Pine. Merikul

By 1894 Ivan Shishkin was the grand old man of Russian landscape, in his early sixties and still teaching at the Academy in St. Petersburg. His summers went to the Gulf of Finland, to Meriküla, a small resort near Narva in what is now Estonia, and one pine there caught him and kept catching him. He painted and drew it more than once, often enough that later guidebooks simply called it Shishkin's pine. Here he sets himself low at its foot and lets the trunk climb the full height of the canvas, thick and scaled, the sun reaching only the top of its crown. A path slips off to the right, small white flowers sit in the grass, and the rest of the wood hangs back as a soft screen of leaves.