The Edge of the Forest

By 1892 Ivan Shishkin had spent almost his whole career on a single subject, the Russian forest, and he was one of the leading figures of the Wanderers, the group of realist painters who took art out to a wider public. What set him apart was patience. Shishkin studied trees, bark, undergrowth and light the way a botanist studies specimens, and he could name what he painted. This is one of many forest edges he returned to, that threshold where the dense trees give way to open ground and the light changes. He painted it six years before his death, still working with the same close attention he had brought to it as a young man. The canvas has travelled a long way from the woods that inspired it. Today it hangs in the National Gallery of Armenia in Yerevan, far from the northern forests Shishkin knew.