Рожь

Shishkin painted this bright field of ripening rye in 1878, from sketches he'd made the summer before on the Lekarevo field near his home town of Yelabuga, out on the Kama river. Look at it and you'd never guess what his life was like just then. In the space of a few years his young wife had died, then his father, then both his small children. The warm gold light and the wide, calm road running away into the rye came out of one of the darkest stretches he ever lived through. He put in things he loved and had known since childhood here: the tall pines standing over the crop, that track leading the eye off toward the horizon. Far to the right there's a single dead pine, bare against the ripe grain, and a low bank of storm cloud is gathering at the edge of the sky. Pavel Tretyakov bought the canvas the same year, straight out of the sixth Wanderers' exhibition in the spring of 1878.