Pino sulla sabbia

Shishkin painted this in 1884, at 52, and the subject is about as bare as he ever chose. One old pine on a sand ridge, a few young ones coming up around it, a track running off into the tree's shadow, three clouds. Sand holds almost no water, so a pine that size standing on it has spent decades pushing roots down to find some. Through those years his summers went to the sandy coast north of St Petersburg, where the ground looks like this. The canvas is 69.5 by 105 centimetres. It hangs in Rybinsk, the Volga town upstream of Yaroslavl, in the picture gallery of the museum-preserve, under the number Zh-171.