The Mill in the Forest

This is a small picture, oil on cardboard rather than canvas, signed and dated 1896 in the lower right corner, with its title written in Russian on the back beside an exhibition stamp. Shishkin was 64 that year. A year later he finished a much larger canvas under the same name, painted at Preobrazhenskoye near Luga, south of St Petersburg, which now belongs to the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan in Tashkent. No published source links this cardboard to that canvas, so the two are best taken as separate pictures from the same late years. This one stayed in private hands. It came up at Sotheby's in London in June 2013, and the auction house's condition report noted four small holes along its upper edge, with some paint losses.