Étude pour le tableau « L'Abattage du bois »

Ivan Shishkin was the painter who gave Russian art its forests, and this is a working study toward one of his first big statements of that, the 1867 canvas usually called Lumbering. He had recently come home from a few years' training in Germany, at Düsseldorf, and was setting out to paint the Russian woods as exactly as anyone ever had, every kind of tree recognisable, the undergrowth and light got right. A study like this is where that precision was worked out ahead of the finished picture, a patch of felled and standing timber looked at closely and set down without arranging it. The larger version hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. This is a step on the way to it.