Mast-Tree grove

Ivan Shishkin painted this in the first weeks of 1898, and he did not live out the year. He died that March at 66, at his easel, at work on another canvas. So this pine grove is close to the last thing he finished, and for it he went back to the beginning. The wood lies near Yelabuga on the Kama River, the town where he was born, painted from almost the same spot he had used for a forest picture more than 20 years earlier. The name points to a use: these are mast trees, pines grown tall and straight and clear of branches because timber like this was cut for the masts of ships. Shishkin knew this kind of forest better than any Russian painter of his time, down to the bark and the light on the sandy floor. He sets the tallest trunks against a small sunlit stream and a far clearing, on one of his largest canvases.