Logs. The Village of Konstantinovka near Krasnoye Selo. Study

This is a study rather than a finished picture, painted outdoors in 1868 near the village of Konstantinovka, close to Krasnoye Selo south of Saint Petersburg. Shishkin was in his mid-thirties and already the painter his countrymen trusted with the plain Russian countryside, and here he set himself something modest: a heap of freshly cut logs beside a village road. He worked it up on the spot, watching how the pale bark caught the light against the trodden earth and the low houses behind. Russia had freed its serfs only seven years before, and ordinary working land like this, rather than grand estates, was the country many painters of his generation now wanted to record. He kept dozens of such studies and drew on them later for the large forest paintings he became known for. The logs lie stacked just as a working village would leave them, waiting to be split.