In the Grove

1865 was the year Shishkin came back. He had been away for three years, in Switzerland and then mostly in Düsseldorf, and that year the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg made him an academician for a large view of the country outside that German city. This grove is from the same year and is a small canvas, 38 by 62 centimetres, with two women halted on a damp track and mossy boulders behind them. The light comes down in patches. He had brought back from Germany the habit of drawing every plant form exactly as he found it, and here the ground gets as much of that attention as the trees. The record gives the year and no place name. The picture stayed in the Academy's own collection for 60 years and reached the Russian Museum in 1925.