The Dark Wood

Shishkin painted this in 1876, and by then he had a reputation as the man who could paint a Russian forest better than anyone alive. He belonged to the Wanderers, a group of artists who had walked out on the official Academy to travel the country and show ordinary Russian land and life, and for Shishkin that meant the woods themselves, studied with almost botanical care. Here the eye is drawn into deep, shaded timber, the kind of dense old forest that still covered much of the Russian north. He drew and painted outdoors constantly, watching how each kind of tree actually grew, so a stand of pines in his work reads as that particular wood and no other.