Paysage de Polésie

Polesie is the great marshland spread across what is now southern Belarus and northern Ukraine, and when Shishkin took it up as a subject in the early 1880s the Russian state was busy draining it. A government survey under the engineer Iosif Zhilinsky had been cutting canals through the bogs since 1873 to turn wetland into meadow and field, work that ran on for another 20 years. What Shishkin painted is the dry end of that story. The pines he is famous for are pushed off to the left edge, and most of the canvas is cut stubble under a high pale sky, with sheaves standing in rows and a scatter of small birds over the field. The museum in Minsk that owns it gives it a fuller name, Harvested Field. Polesie Landscape.