Pine Forest

1889 was the year Shishkin showed Morning in a Pine Forest with the Wanderers, the canvas whose bear cubs later ended up printed on Russia's best known chocolate wrapper. This comes from the same year at a completely different scale, an oil study on cardboard about 58 centimetres across, a corner of pine wood under summer light with sandy paths running through it. He worked outdoors constantly and left far more studies than finished pictures. The painting hangs at Polenovo, the house Vasily Polenov built above the Oka river in 1892 and ran as a museum in his own lifetime, taking in schoolchildren and villagers. Polenov filled a room there with work by painters he knew, Shishkin among them, and the study still carries its museum inventory number in that collection.