The Mikhailovsky Palace

The art of Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898) extols the Russian forest. After graduating from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Shishkin studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts. He went abroad in 1862 and lived and worked in Düsseldorf. Returning home, he wrote in his diary: “My motto? To be Russian. Long live Russia!”

Shishkin studied nature at great length, aspiring to create an exact lifelike image. Many of his pictures encompass every single detail of nature (Pine Grove, 1898), though this by no means implies primitive naturalism. Among Shishkin’s studies are no small number of genuine masterpieces of the poetic representation of nature (Goutweed. Pargolovo, 1884(5?)). Such pictures as Oaks (1887) and Winter (1890) are lyrical and monumental images of the different states of the Russian landscape.