Town Roofs in Winter

This winter study is only about 22 centimetres square, and nothing in it names the town. The Russian Museum dates it no closer than the 1860s. What Shishkin painted is the back side of a place, seen from above: shabby low houses, caps of snow on the roofs, blank brick firewalls, a few stunted trees. For a painter whose name became tied to forests, it is one of his least typical pictures, and the museum acquired it only in 1979, from the Leningrad collector I. T. Akopyan. When it was shown in St Petersburg in 2021, the critic Anna Tolstova wrote that its air, its light and its grey-ochre colouring made her think less of the 1860s than of the Leningrad landscape painters of the 1930s.