Pine Forest

By 1897 Ivan Shishkin was in his mid-sixties and painting the same subject he had chased for forty years: the Russian pine forest. While painters across Europe were dissolving trees into flecks of light, he was still setting down every trunk, every strip of bark, the dry needles and the moss on the forest floor with an almost botanist's patience. Critics had long called him the tsar of the forest, and he wore it plainly. He belonged to the Wanderers, the painters who carried their exhibitions across the whole country. This was among his last full years of work. In March 1898 he died at his easel in his studio, at work on another woodland scene.