Morning in a Pine Forest

By 1889 Shishkin was the most respected landscape painter in Russia, and he knew exactly what he could and could not do. He could paint a pine forest at dawn better than anyone alive, the mist still caught in the trunks, the light just reaching the broken tree. What he doubted was the bears. So the four bears clambering over that fallen pine were actually painted by his friend Konstantin Savitsky, an animal painter, and the canvas first left the studio signed by both men. Then Pavel Tretyakov bought it for his Moscow gallery, decided the whole conception was Shishkin's, and had Savitsky's signature scrubbed off with turpentine. That is why the most famous animals in Russian art hang under one name only. The picture went further than any gallery could carry it. A Moscow confectioner put a copy on a chocolate wrapper in the 1890s, the Clumsy Bear sweet, and for generations of Russians the painting and the candy have been the same image. The forest itself Shishkin knew from the woods near Yelabuga where he grew up.