Sentier de montagne. Crimée

Shishkin travelled to Crimea in 1879 and came back with a pile of drawings and oil studies. That November Kramskoi wrote to Tretyakov that the man had moved forward in colour, a pointed thing to say about a painter admired mostly for the exactness of his drawing. This is one of those studies, oil on paper laid down on board. A stony path climbs between boulders, the grass along it is dry and pale, and the ridge behind is shut in by cloud. He passed over the southern sunshine that everyone else went south for and took an overcast day instead, closer to the light he had painted all his life in the north. The material he carried home fed the larger canvases he showed at the Peredvizhniki exhibition in 1880.