The Sun Lit Pines

Ivan Shishkin painted Russia's forests more closely than anyone before him, close enough that a botanist could name his trees. This is a small, sunlit thing from 1886: two pines on a bank, the light coming through warm and low, the far distance dissolving into haze. It has the feel of work done on the spot, in one spell of good afternoon light, rather than built up slowly in a studio. Shishkin belonged to the Wanderers, the painters who broke from the academy to bring ordinary Russian life and land to ordinary Russian people, and for him that meant the pine woods he had known since boyhood in Yelabuga on the Kama. He came back to these sunlit trunks and clearings for decades. Here the subject is almost nothing but the light itself, and two trees standing in it.