Цветы у забора

By the 1880s Shishkin was the most recognisable landscape painter in Russia, and what made him recognisable were large studio canvases of pine forest and rye, shown each year at the travelling exhibitions of the Peredvizhniki. This is not one of those. It is small, roughly half a metre wide, flowers crowding a fence, painted outdoors in front of the thing itself.

Shishkin worked that way constantly and insisted on it as a teacher, refusing invented trees and remembered light. Pictures of this size stayed in the studio rather than going out to an exhibition, and many of them only reached public collections long after he died in 1898. This one ended up in Vladimir, in the museum-reserve that looks after the old town's 12th-century cathedrals alongside its paintings.