Walk in the Forest

In 1869 Shishkin was a year into his marriage to Evgenia Vasilyeva, the sister of the young landscape painter Fyodor Vasilyev, and he did something he almost never did. He put people in the forest. The Tretyakov reads the couple leading the walk among the birches and aspens as the painter himself with his new wife. Behind them comes a family with a small girl, and a dog runs on ahead. His reputation rested on stands of pine and oak with nobody in them at all, recorded almost the way a botanist would, so this canvas of about 34 by 43 centimetres sits apart from the rest of his work. Evgenia died in 1874. The painting stayed in private hands until 1942, when the gallery bought it from a collector in the middle of the war.