In front of the mirror

For decades almost nobody connected this interior with Ivan Shishkin, the painter of forests. A young woman in a dark dress stands by a tall mirror reading a letter, its torn envelope on the floor behind her. Shishkin had married Yevgenia Vasilyeva in 1868, and a scholar who compared the face with her photographs found the likeness hard to dismiss. In the summer of 1870 he spent months in Nizhny Novgorod on a commission for Emperor Alexander II, and his letters home begged her to write more often. The proof of authorship turned up in his own archive, a handwritten list of his paintings with a small pencil sketch beside each. Entry number two reads simply Genre, and its sketch matches this canvas. On the wall above her hangs a large picture of tall pines, very much like one of his own.