The Forest Clearing

This large oak wood spent more than a century with one family. According to them, Shishkin gave it to an ancestor of theirs as a present, and it was handed down from generation to generation until the family, by then living in England, sent it to Christie's in New York. The sale was in April 2008, a few months before the financial crash, when prices for Russian painting were at their height. The canvas was estimated at one to 1.4 million dollars and sold for about 3.2 million. It is signed and dated 1896, one of the big canvases of Shishkin's last years, well over a metre and a half across. The auction catalogue suggested the wood might be near Vyra, south of St Petersburg, where he had a country house, though nothing in the picture names the place. Sun comes through the canopy onto a meadow thick with white flowers, and two old oaks on the left reach their low, crooked branches out over the grass.