In the Dacha (Near Dacha)

By the 1890s a summer outside the city had become a habit for Russia's urban middle class. Families from St Petersburg and Moscow rented wooden dachas along the railway lines, and a guidebook of 1881 explained that most people went there to mend their health. Shishkin, better known for deep forest, painted this in 1894 and let one of those summer visitors into the picture. A young woman in a white blouse and a dark skirt sits on a wooden bench at the edge of a birch grove, a pink parasol tilted over her head. Behind her the trees thin out towards water and a low gate. Most of the canvas goes to the sandy road in front of her, striped with the shadows of the trunks, and his signature with the date sits down in its lower right corner.