Off the coast of the Gulf of Finland (Udrias near Narva)

In 1889 Shishkin sent two large canvases to the 17th exhibition of the Wanderers, the society of realist painters who toured their shows around Russia. One was Morning in a Pine Forest, the misty wood with a she-bear and her cubs, which the collector Pavel Tretyakov bought. The other was this view of the Baltic shore near Narva. For a painter of deep forest it is an unusually open picture, almost a metre and a half wide and mostly sea and pale sky, with a field track running along the top of a flat cliff that drops to a thin strip of sand. Reviewing the exhibition, the writer and critic Pyotr Gnedich said the place of honour went to Shishkin for these two canvases together. In that review he spelled the name of the place Idrias.