Winter Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898)

Description of Ivan Shishkin’s painting "Winter" (Winter Forest)

This is a period of the artist’s mature work, having long wanted to begin painting a winter forest mysteriously shrouded in cold and frost. Shishkin painted this painting in 1890, in which he succeeds in conveying with white hues the winter forest asleep under the snow. It seems as if it is petrified, frozen in torpor until the warmth and spring. Only mighty trunks of trees are darkened against the snow-white background.

You can see that it has snowed, so the branches are hanging down under the weight of the snow. Their majesty is marvelous, over which one can admire for hours. The impenetrable and gloomy forest, combined with light and airy snow, makes the viewer feel the power of nature and the onset of cold weather. Young Christmas trees are also lurking under the blanket of snow.

And only a small ray of sunlight faintly, barely penetrates through this thicket, into the realm of a small glade lurking in the foreground of the picture and colors it with the golden light of the sun’s rays. In the clearing lie broken tree trunks and branches. Perhaps they have collapsed, unable to withstand the weight of snow or natural elements. But the eye is drawn to the only gap, deepened in the picture amidst all the darkness of the forest, filled with light - the clearing.

Silence and peace, beauty and dead, like a crystal snow-covered nature, all asleep around. There is no human or animal footprint in the snow, this gives the picture a lack of any life. The image is so real that it seems as if one could reach out and feel everything for real. The picture is mysterious and enigmatic, fabulous.

And if you look closer, you can see that the author used a lot of grayish and yellow shades for the image, it gave it a kind of play of light. And the forest is not at all desolate. Here on one of the twigs lurks a bird that surprises the eye among the winter landscape.