Herd under the Trees

In 1863, travelling abroad on an allowance from the Academy of Arts, Shishkin went to Zurich with a plan. He wanted, in his own words, to join landscape with animals, and he took lessons from Rudolf Koller, a Swiss painter of cattle and hunting scenes. Out of those months came a run of pictures of cows and sheep, resting in the shade or grazing by streams, and this canvas of 1864 is one of them. Two cows stand at the centre under a broad tree, with the flock lying at their feet. After about half a year Shishkin left Koller's studio and went back to pure landscape. The pair of cows stayed with him, and he repeated and varied that group in other compositions into the 1870s. The canvas reached the Tretyakov Gallery in 1995, a gift from the Russian government on the day the museum reopened after its reconstruction.