In the Park

Ivan Shishkin made his name with wild country, the pine wood and the forest thicket that nobody had planted. This canvas from 1897, the year he turned 65, is a park. A still pond fills the foreground and holds the reflections of the trunks, a lawn opens beyond it, and a path runs off between tall broadleaf trees. There is not a single pine in the picture. The place is not identified, and the title names nothing more than a park. It is a sizeable canvas, a little over a metre across, and the trees are set down one by one with the patience Shishkin usually saved for his forests. The Tretyakov Gallery also keeps a smaller canvas from the same late years with a pond in an old park as its subject.