森の晴れた日。樫の木

In 1891 Shishkin did something painters of his standing did not usually do. He filled the halls of the Imperial Academy of Arts in Petersburg with his studies, drawings and prints going back to 1849, the working material a landscape painter normally kept in the studio and never showed. This oak study comes from that same year, 30 centimetres by 37, the size he used out of doors. Oaks were the trees he came back to most, and in 1891 he was also at work on the large canvas of the old oaks at Peterhof. The study now hangs a long way east, in Khanty-Mansiysk in western Siberia, part of a collection the oil-producing district built up through its Fund of Generations and handed to the museum in 2011.