古尔祖夫郊外。习作

Shishkin spent the summer of 1879 in the Crimea, which for the painter of northern pine forests meant a landscape with almost nothing familiar in it. He travelled with two fellow painters, Yefim Volkov and Andrei Schilder, worked his way through the mountains above the south coast and came back to St Petersburg with a stack of studies. Twelve Crimean landscapes went on show the following year. This one is small, 35 by 54 centimetres, oil on canvas laid down on cardboard, the kind of board that travels in a paint box. Two years after he was there, the railway contractor Pyotr Gubonin bought Gurzuf outright and began turning it into a spa resort with hotels and a bathing beach. The study reached the Russian Museum in 1931, from the Academy of Arts.