Foresta di conifere. Giornata di sole

Shishkin painted this in 1895, during the single year he spent running the landscape studio at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. The Academy had been rebuilt from the inside in 1894, and the Wanderers, the independent exhibiting society that had spent two decades as its opposition, were brought in as professors. Shishkin was 62 and took the landscape workshop. He lasted one academic year in the post. The canvas stands taller than it is wide, 137 centimetres by 103, so the trunks leave the picture at the top edge and the sun reaches only a low clearing of fallen wood and one old stump. Three years later he died in his St Petersburg studio, at 66.