Harvesting

This is the earliest of the five Shishkin paintings kept in the house in Yelabuga where he grew up, a merchant's house his father built in 1835. The museum dates it only to the 1850s. At the start of that decade the young man was still living here, having left school in Kazan, and he stayed until 1852, when he went to Moscow to train as an artist. Harvest is under way on a wide field, the sheaves stacked in stooks across it, and on a low rise beyond stand a village and a white church. Near the front a few women in red rest among the sheaves. The upper half of the canvas is sky, full of tall white clouds. A local filmmaker tracing the artist's motifs has linked this view to the village of Tatarskiye Chelny, near Yelabuga.