The forest brook

Ivan Shishkin painted the Russian forest more patiently than almost anyone of his generation, and by 1885 he was its acknowledged master, the leading landscape painter among the Peredvizhniki, the travelling exhibitors who carried Russian art out to the provinces. A forest brook was exactly the kind of quiet motif he trusted: no drama, no anecdote, just water moving over stones between the trees. He worked outdoors from close study and then assembled the finished canvas in the studio, after the naturalist's habit of looking hard before deciding anything. That care was famous in his own lifetime. Colleagues joked that Shishkin knew every species of grass and moss by name, and could read the age of a pine from its bark.