Backwoods 1872 209h161 Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898)

Description of Ivan Shishkin’s painting "The Forest Wilderness".

Created in 1872, the canvas once again confirms the artist’s love of nature and especially of the forest. He depicted it at noon, in clear weather, where light plays in the leaves. But there is another version of the forest thicket: full of darkness and the unexplored.

Such a vision is capable of evoking awe or even fear of the unknown in the viewer. It is these feelings that Shishkin awakens with his painting "Forest wilderness". It was the sensuality of the painting that earned the master the title of professor, immediately upon completion of his work on it.

Looking at the woods, few would want to be in a similar place, and even more alone. But not immediately the viewer can see a full-fledged forest in the depicted landscape. The artist conceived the picture for a long time consideration by the viewer. He has to feel what he sees, to get used to it, to look deeper.

The painting is full of small details that can escape a fleeting glance. There is a fox and a duck, which escapes from the clutches of the cunning predator. The artist was scolded by his fellow painters more than once for such detailing, calling the picture a painted picture, and the details piecemeal into the overall image. But the detailing of the depicted has never affected the integrity of the image being created.

The depicted forest does not evoke gusts of inspiration or lyrical reflections, but still it appears to the viewer strikingly rich in its colors and varied in its details. These details beckon one to gaze long and closely at the treasures that the forest hides in the shadows of its branches. Then the viewer, absorbed in the mysteries, imperceptibly dissolves and only nature remains around.

And so Shishkin created this landscape as an embodiment of his own spiritual impulses, as a reflection of his own view of the infinitely beautiful element of nature: the dense northern forest, untouched so far by the hand of man.