Cementerio en el bosque

In 1893 the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg made Shishkin a full member. He was 61, and the Academy had just been reformed in a way that opened it to the Wanderers, the independent exhibiting society he had helped found in 1870 to work outside the Academy's system. Within a year he was running its landscape workshop. The picture he made that year is given over to dead wood. It is about 176 centimetres across, and most of that width is fallen trunks, stumps, roots and moss, with living pines standing on the remains of older ones. His own Russian title gives the painting two names, old deadwood and forest cemetery.