Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin

Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist, circa late 1880s)
Thence by descent

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is unlined and is probably still on its original stretcher. There are reinforcements in the upper and lower left on the reverse of the canvas which address tears in the canvas. There is also a scratch on the lower left and a few other chips of paint loss, predominantly in the upper left. In general the picture is in very fresh condition. If the canvas were to be lined, the surface could be safely cleaned and the small losses retouched. Despite the obvious structural damages, the condition seems to be good.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The idea of landscape as picturesque or sublime dominated European landscape painting of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. By the early 1870s, landscape painting had begun to assume greater importance in Russia's artistic culture. It was among the favorite modes of expression of the Itinerants—a group of nineteenth-century realist artists—although pictures of ordinary Russian landscapes first appeared in academic exhibitions in the late 1850s.

Initially, Russian realist landscape painters were closely linked to the pastoral vision of the Barbizon school artists in France; both saw nature as a corrective to modern life. In contrast to their Impressionist contemporaries in France, Russian artists rarely made a point of depicting specific locales. While the Impressionists usually titled their paintings after the location of the place represented, the Russian realists often gave titles that reflected the atmospheric conditions or natural elements of a site, for example, After the Rain or Birch Grove. In the late nineteenth century, the Itinerants gave rise to a boom in Russian landscape painting, and their preoccupation with native imagery was in keeping with their objective of building a realistic, popular, national school of Russian art. Indeed, over half the paintings featured in their first shows were landscapes.

A founding member of the Itinerants and a highly esteemed master of Russian realist landscape painting, Ivan Shishkin diminished the use of picturesque Italianate models that had informed Russian landscape painting of the previous few centuries, allowing the rural Russian landscape, rendered in natural tones and realistic detail, to become its own subject matter. His creative method was based on analytical studies and on a kind of "portrait-like" approach to nature that revealed its most typical features. The artist's insistence on the concrete rendering of every tree and botanical detail was so extreme that he became known among his students as "bukhgalter listochkov" (the accountant of leaves). The artist Ivan Kramskoi, a leading member of the Itinerants who rated Shishkin's art very highly, had this to say about Shishkin: "I think he is the only artist among us who knows nature in a scholarly way... Shishkin is a milepost in the development of Russian landscape painting; he is a whole school in one man." 

After studying at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture under A.N. Mokritsky (1852-56), Shishkin attended the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts from 1856 to 1860, completing his studies with the highest honors and a gold medal. In 1862, he was awarded a three-year scholarship to study in Europe. He never left northern Europe during his stay, traveling to Germany and spending time in Switzerland and Prague. He deliberately avoided those parts of Europe that visiting artists typically frequented, like Paris and Italy. He wrote in a letter from Zurich: "I still won't go to Italy, even if there were a chance to. I do not like it because it is too sweet." Shishkin spent half a year in the Zurich workshop of R. Koller and resided for one year in Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and worked in the Teutoburg Forest outside the city.

In 1865 Shishkin returned to Russia, receiving the title of Academician for his depictions of the environs of Düsseldorf. At the Itinerants' second exhibition Shishkin presented the painting In the Backwoods, a work that in 1873 earned him the title Professor of Landscape Painting. In 1894 he was appointed Head of Landscape Painting at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. Shishkin died suddenly on March 8, 1898, while working on his landscape Forest Kingdom.

Shishkin has been called the "bard of the Russian forest," for his portrayals of the Russian woodlands have much in common with the Russian epic tradition, with its elevated mood and heroic spirit. He specialized in meticulously detailed woodland scenes, in which any sense of specific location is lacking. Unlike other Russian landscape painters of the time, for example Alexei Savrasov, who preferred to depict the various seasons, Shishkin preferred to emphasize nature's permanence rather than its mutability. His style was often referred to as "monumental naturalism."

The present lot is an example of such a style, and it belongs to Shishkin's mature period (1880s-1890s). The painting demonstrates Shishkin's ability to see beauty in what at first glance may appear mundane, alongside his talent for reproducing diverse forms of vegetation with extraordinary precision. Using a restricted palette of browns in combination with shades of green and ochre, he created a poetic yet realistic view of a forest. Although the work is painted with a great attention to detail, Shishkin presents the viewer with a seemingly random and casual composition; this is especially evident in the asymmetrical arrangement of the trees—a stark contrast to the ordering of nature in academic art.

A detailed study of nature is always at the basis of Shishkin's finished compositions. He became one of the first Russian landscape painters of the second half of the nineteenth century to strongly believe in the importance of direct studies from nature. Returning to St. Petersburg after his summers spent painting en plein air, he always brought hundreds of sketches and studies. As seen in the present lot, the play of light is beautifully conceived in his work, but is never the sole purpose of a canvas; it never obscures or transcends the material detail. The texture of every element is not sacrificed to the texture of the work as a whole, as was the case with the plein air paintings of the Impressionists.