Pine Forest. Unfinished Sketch

Shishkin built his name on forests painted with almost botanical exactness, every needle and patch of bark in focus, which made critics call him the ruler of the Russian forest. This canvas is the opposite kind of thing, a sketch he left unfinished in 1894, and that is exactly why it is worth stopping on. You can see how he began, blocking in the mass and light of the pines before any of the fine detail arrived. He was in his early sixties here, four years before he died at his easel in 1898. The work hangs in Kazan, in the region where he was born, at Yelabuga on the Kama river, the countryside whose forests he had been painting his whole life.