Nel bosco

The gallery in Yerevan that owns this forest opened in 1921 with almost nothing on its walls. The city had no old private collections to build on, so its first pictures were bought straight out of an exhibition of Armenian painters that August, and through the following decade crates arrived from the House of Armenian Culture in Moscow and then from the museums of Leningrad. By 1925 about 400 works by Armenian, Russian and European painters hung in six halls. Shishkin was 32 when he painted this, in 1864, working abroad in Düsseldorf and still a long way from famous. The canvas is a large one for a forest interior, 105 centimetres by 140, and it carries the gallery's inventory number 586.