Wilds

By the early 1880s the Moscow collector Pavel Tretyakov was Shishkin's most reliable buyer. New landscapes went every year to the Wanderers' travelling exhibitions, and if Tretyakov let one slip past him there, he often tracked it down later. This canvas of 1881 did end up in his collection, and it is still in the gallery that carries his name. The Russian title, Debri, means the dense, tangled depths of a forest, and the picture holds almost nothing else: spruce trunks, lower branches dead and grey, moss spread over boulders and fallen wood. The gallery's own description points to how often the brushwork changes. Broad, loose strokes build up the needles, a narrow line running down a trunk gives the cracks in the bark, and short upright dabs make the moss. In places Shishkin turned the brush around and scratched thin, broken lines into the wet paint with the handle, to draw blades of dry grass.