Landscape with a hunter. Valaam Island

In the summer of 1867 Shishkin went back to Valaam, the monastery island in Lake Ladoga, and this time he took a 17-year-old pupil with him, Fyodor Vasilyev, who would soon make his own name as a landscape painter. The two of them stayed on the island from June until late in the autumn, painting studies from nature. The Russian Museum describes what drew painters to Valaam in these years as its wild northern ground, the moss-covered boulders, stunted growth and fallen branches, which he copied with particular care. A great mossy rock fills the right side, birch trunks rise across the middle, and a patch of dark standing water lies in the foreground. The hunter of the title is a small figure with a gun among the birches, easy to miss at first. The canvas came to the Russian Museum in 1949, from the Moscow collection of G. P. Belyakov.