Woodland Scene 1889-1890 51. 2х36 9 Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898)

Description of the painting "Forest Landscape" by Ivan Shishkin

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Russian painting blossomed rapidly thanks to the work of a pleiad of brilliant painters-peredvizhniki. More than in any other country, the famous Russian landscape painters - Savrasov, Polenov, Levitan, Aivazovsky, and Shishkin - made a particularly valuable contribution to the development of fine art.

For all its relative neutrality, the landscape genre, thanks to his great talent and tireless work with nature, made Shishkin a truly legendary painter. In the words of Ivan Ivanovich himself, Russia is a country of landscapes. Its special national sensibility and gravitation towards the epic traditions of folklore caused Shishkin’s national recognition and a worthy place in the world’s visual arts.

Shishkin landscapes are characterized by incredible realism and integrity of the image, the particular finesse and fullness of light and air mass, incredibly reverent and aesthetic attitude to detail. Shishkin puts color performance in the background, considering it unacceptable to artificially elevate the natural charm and poetry of the subject.

Painting "Forest Landscape", created in 1890, - one of the later works of the artist. It recreates Shishkin’s favorite subject - the mighty pine woods on a sunny summer day. There is a small pond in the foreground, a tree fallen somewhere in early summer because its leaves have not yet dried, and a bush of marsh flowers. A little further away you can see a bridge over the creek made of two cut down trees and a wide path running down the slope of a small hill. This inseparability of nature from man - also a characteristic feature of landscapes Shishkin, which he tried to emphasize the importance of constant contact with the human birth and nourishing environment, their need for each other.

People are not visible in the picture, but all clearly felt their presence. We can see mushroom pickers walking with baskets across the bridge, peasants returning from the neighboring village, children running to the distant bend of the stream to bathe. And now you involuntarily want to inhale this warm pine air and the smell of forest flowers and sit under a tree on the warm grass, leaning back against a stubby resinous trunk.