Pierres dans la forêt. Valaam

Valaam is an island of granite and old pine in Lake Ladoga, north of St Petersburg, with a monastery on it, and in the 1850s the Academy of Arts sent its landscape students there for the summer. Shishkin went in 1858, aged 26, and wrote home that he and a fellow student had been invited for the season. The rock is the whole point of this small study. He is working out how a boulder sits into moss and roots, at a size that rests on the knee, 32 centimetres by 43. The island paid him back. In 1860 a view painted there won him the Academy's large gold medal, and with it the money to travel abroad. The study came to the Russian Museum in 1925, out of the collection of the painter Vladimir Makovsky.