The story
The man who built this house was known in Yelabuga long before his son was known anywhere. Ivan Vasilyevich Shishkin was a merchant, twice elected head of the town, and the sort of person who did things at his own expense. In 1833 he designed and paid for a wooden water pipeline for Yelabuga. In 1867 he took on the restoration of the stone tower at Chertovo Gorodishche, the ruined Bulgar fortress above the river, working with a Moscow scholar of old manuscripts. He wrote the town's history as well.
His son Ivan grew up on the ground floor of this house, in rooms furnished now the way a merchant household on the Kama looked in the 1840s. Upstairs is the painter, his canvases and drawings and etchings, his working materials and the family's papers. The house stands high above the Toima, near where it runs into the Kama.
The museum opened on 24 July 1975 and belongs to the Yelabuga museum reserve, which also keeps the town's other memorial house, the one for Marina Tsvetaeva, who died here in 1941.
