Pines

By 1890 Ivan Shishkin had been painting the Russian forest for more than 30 years, and people had taken to calling him the tsar of the woods. He worked as much like a botanist as a painter, getting the bark, the needles, and the way light falls through a stand of pines exactly right, so that a forester could tell you which trees these are. That precision was the whole point for the Peredvizhniki, the travelling painters he belonged to, who wanted Russian art to show Russian land plainly and truthfully. This canvas hangs in Ufa, in the art museum named for the painter Mikhail Nesterov, who was born in that city and in 1913 gave it his own collection of Russian pictures to start a museum for his hometown. Shishkin kept painting pines until 1898, the year he died.