I. I. Shishkin and A. V. Gine in the Studio on the Valaam Island

Around 1860 two young landscape painters were working together on Valaam, the monastery island in Lake Ladoga, north of St Petersburg. Ivan Shishkin and Alexander Gine had been schoolboys together in Kazan, then studied painting side by side in Moscow and at the Academy of Arts, and they went out to the island more than once. This small study on paper shows them indoors, an unusual subject for a painter known for his forests. One friend sits on a bench with a book or sketchbook on his knee, the other bends over a table beside the back of a large canvas on its easel. Landscape studies hang on the walls, a small icon hangs above the doorway, and through the arched window you can see red roofs and the lake. The Russian Museum lists both friends as its authors. It came there in 1924 from Pushkin House, the literary institute of the Academy of Sciences, out of the collection of Adolf Marx, the St Petersburg publisher of the magazine Niva.