Sandy Coastline

Ivan Shishkin is remembered as the painter of the Russian forest, the deep pine woods of the north and center of the country. This canvas comes from a summer he spent much further south. In 1879 he was working in Crimea, and the tall pines here are southern ones, gripping a dry sandy shore instead of standing in dark northern soil. The motif caught him enough to paint it more than once. Two variations of the scene survive. The canvas is unusually tall and narrow, a little over 130 centimeters high, which lets the pines rise almost the full height of the picture.