Palude in Polesia

When Shishkin painted this marsh, the Russian state was busy trying to make it go away. From 1873 a survey and drainage expedition under General Iosif Zhilinsky had been cutting canals across Polesye, the enormous wetland spread over what is now southern Belarus and northern Ukraine. It ran for 25 years and is usually described as the largest bog drainage works attempted anywhere at that point. Landowners wanted meadow and timber out of it, the army wanted roads that did not sink.

Shishkin went to Polesye for material and came back with the things the engineers were not measuring. Standing water, dead trees still upright, cranes on the far bank, a horizon with nothing built on it.

He was 58 in 1890 and had spent 30 years being known in Russia as the painter of forests rather than of open ground.