Portrait Shishkin 1880 115. 5h188

Description of the painting "Portrait of Shishkin" by Ivan Kramskoi

Ivan Kramsky’s portraits were born from the technique of retouching photographs. The future painter wandered around Russia and sketched photographic portraits, learning at the same time the laws of light and volume.

In St. Petersburg he finally gained fame as a superb retoucher. He dared to pass the exams for the Imperial Academy of Arts without preparation and was successfully enrolled among the students and the most famous artists of the era.

After the rebellion that arose as a result of his protest against the academic order, Kramskoy and his associates organized an Artel of painters with a free choice of subjects, followed by traveling exhibitions. The portrait painter’s talent manifested itself with greater certainty and power in the second half of the 19th century. He became a fashionable artist and was awarded the title of academician.

Kramskoy was commissioned by Tretyakov to paint a series of portraits to create a gallery of outstanding Russian people, among whom appears a portrait of the landscape painter Shishkin. We can see the real faces of people who brought glory to Russia and played a role in the history of art.

Kramskoy was friends with Shishkin and was his ideological inspirer. Ivan Kramskoi’s realistic, almost photographic paintings tell us about the fates of the era. Kramskoy portrayed Shishkin twice.

His portrait, painted in 1880, is a truthful and wholesome image of the landscape painter. The viewer sees a contemporary of Kramsky, who has just married for the second time. The large figure stares calmly out of the canvas. His big hands do not fit into his pockets.

His open high forehead betrays a master with a kind character, which is quite in line with the verbal descriptions of his colleagues, who spoke of him as harsh only in appearance. He was judged by his Great Russian appearance as a parish foreman, in fact, who belonged to a fine art.

Kramskoy portrayed him as the "master of the forest and poet of nature" - a tall, handsome, strong man with a penetrating look and a bushy beard.