松林间的小径

This canvas is 96 by 143 centimetres, and it hangs in a theatre museum. The Bakhrushin in Moscow is devoted to the Russian stage, so its neighbours are set designs, costume sketches and portraits of actors. The place began as a private collection. Alexei Bakhrushin, a Moscow industrialist, started buying theatrical material in the 1890s, opened his collection to visitors in 1894, and in 1913 handed it to the Academy of Sciences to keep it together. He collected well beyond the theatre, which is how paintings by Polenov, Korovin, Vrubel and Shishkin came to sit in the same holdings. Shishkin painted these pines in 1883, a summer he was working at Siverskaya on the Oredezh river south of St Petersburg, which gave him several forest canvases of that year.