森の小道

This is from 1897, one of the last things Shishkin made. A road running into the wood, on a canvas taller than it is wide, 111 by 83.5 centimetres, so the trees close over the track instead of opening out around it. It hangs in Ufa, in the southern Urals, in a museum that exists because of another artist. Mikhail Nesterov was born in the city, and in 1913 he handed it 102 Russian paintings and drawings he had collected, with Shishkin among the names in them. Those works became a public collection that opened its doors on 5 January 1920, in the middle of the civil war, and the museum still carries Nesterov's name.