Shishkin’s Forest

Kramskoi painted him in 1880 as a dark coat and a grey beard, hands in pockets, a watch-chain, the face of a man who has come in from weather. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that contemporaries called him the “tsar of the woods.” Galina Churak, writing for the Tretyakov Gallery Magazine, remembers him as the painter who translated into oil “the limitless vastness of fields with golden grain, the greatness of oak forests… every single grass-blade.” The studio portrait is the public face. The work is what happens when that face goes back outside and does not stop drawing. He is not a mood. He is a botanist of light who happened to be a poet.

He was born on 13 January 1832, 25 January New Style, in Yelabuga, in Vyatka province, a town Churak says was once tightly encircled by woodlands. His father, Ivan Vasilievich, was a merchant who wanted an heir and then, meeting stubbornness, let the son go. After the Yelabuga school, the boy was sent in 1844 to the Kazan gymnasium and quit in 1848, “in order to avoid becoming a clerk,” as he later put it. In 1852, at twenty, he left for Moscow and the College of Art and Sculpture. The clerk he refused is still in the sentence. Russian landscape painting of his generation is, among other things, the refusal of a desk.

In order to avoid becoming a clerk.

Kramskoi’s 1873 portrait is the other likeness: hat, staff, sketching kit, boots in the grass, a man mid-stride among umbels and pale stalks. This is not a studio. It is a profession walking. That autumn of 1852, still a student in Moscow, he saw exhibitions of Ivan Aivazovsky and Leo Lagorio. The seascapes dazzled him and made him argue with himself. Churak quotes the wonder: if mountains and seas come out so good in pictures, why wouldn’t our forests and fields? The question is the career. He would spend the rest of his life answering it with pine bark, rye, and the particular mud of a Russian road. Aivazovsky had the Black Sea. Shishkin would have the woods that had stood around Yelabuga before he had a name for them.

If mountains and seas come out so good in the pictures, why wouldn’t our forests and fields?

Apollon Mokritsky, a student of Venetsianov and Briullov, taught him to honour “the material differences” of things. He drew Sokolniki, Ostankino, burdock, carts, the difference between one stump and another. In 1856 he entered the Academy in St Petersburg, found the place “august and solid,” and missed Moscow’s simplicity. Valaam, for three summers, was his northern church of granite and fir. A gold medal in 1860 sent him abroad: Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Prague, Düsseldorf, a short look at France he did not then love. He studied drawing as if it were a moral fact. The German masters’ devotion to a national landscape confirmed what Yelabuga had already proposed. Italy, for his generation of landscapists, had lost its old monopoly on beauty.

Back in Russia in 1865, he walked into the Artel around Kramskoi and into the future Peredvizhniki. Noon. Near Moscow, 1869, is among the first pictures in which the native land is not a practice motif but a claim. A road, heat, a sky that is actually high, the ordinary sublime of a summer day near the capital. Pavel Tretyakov bought it after the 1869 exhibition — Shishkin’s first work in that collection. Churak calls the native-land theme, from this canvas on, the key to his art. Key, here, is not a slogan. It is a dirt track and the patience to paint the dust. The grand, he had decided while working on Tree Felling two years earlier, can be very simple.

Backwoods, 1872, in the Russian Museum, puts you inside. Fallen trunks, damp shade, no polite horizon. The same year, Pine Forest. Mast-tree Forest in Vyatskaya Province went to the Tretyakov, and he showed with the Peredvizhniki from their first exhibition onward. Backwoods brought him the title of professor. Vladimir Makovsky wrote to him that the picture set a serious tone for the show. Kramskoi, comparing Shishkin’s pine forest with Fyodor Vasiliev’s Dewy Meadow, made the distinction that still helps a visitor: “Shishkin’s nature is primarily objective, while yours is subjective.” Objective, in this mouth, is not cold. It is a forest that does not need your confession in order to exist. You are led in. The trees were there first.

Shishkin’s nature is primarily objective, while yours is subjective.

Rye, 1878, in the Tretyakov, is the other national sentence: not the thicket but the field. A road through grain. Pines standing in the gold as if they had waded in. A high pale sky. Churak traces the image to a summer near Yelabuga in 1877, sketches on the Lekarevo field, and to an older wish, already visible in the 1869 noon picture, for “the free-flowing expanse of the motherland.” The entire landscape, she writes, is suffused with sublime peace. Peace, on this canvas, is not emptiness. It is rye as far as looking can go, and trees that have not been asked to be symbols. If you know only the bears in the pine mist, you have not yet stood in this heat. This is the picture in which Russia is a harvest and a road, and both are allowed to be literal.

He said, as Churak quotes him, that study of nature can never be completed: you can never say you have learned the subject well enough. The 1870s and early 1880s were also a run of deaths — father and a small son in 1872, Vasiliev in 1873, his wife Yevgeniya the next year, another child, then, after a second marriage in 1880, Olga Lagoda dead the following year. Kramskoi, in a letter Churak cites, found him “craggy,” taking up photography, not painting, and still hoped the hard nut would crack back into work. Amidst a Flat Vale, 1883, named from an old romance, is the return Churak reads as a standoff with fate: a lone oak, a long vale, song-like horizontals. The biography is grief. The pictures, when they resume, are still trees. He did not paint his losses as allegory. He went back to looking until looking could bear him.

Oak Grove, 1887, now in Kyiv, is the oak as a civic fact: thick trunks, a floor of grass, sun that has weight. Churak places it with In Peter I’s Private Grove among the 1880s pictures of “vehement vigour.” He painted oaks again and again — studies that are almost finished pictures, Mordvinovo oaks, old Peterhof. Plein-air problems, light and shade as substances, enter without dissolving the drawing he would not betray. If Levitan’s birch grove is a room of flickering shade, Shishkin’s oaks are architecture. You could measure them. That measurability is the poetry. A tree, for him, is not a mood’s servant. It is a creature with bark.

Morning in a Pine Forest, 1889, is the canvas everyone has already seen, often on a chocolate wrapper. Churak is careful, and so should a visitor be. The bears were painted by Konstantin Savitsky, a friend. They sit at the centre of the plot. The true main character, she insists, is the landscape: a forest still virginal, wrapped in predawn haze. Critics found the huge canvas too genre, the bears a threat to monumentality. Popularity did the picture a disservice. People remember the cubs and forget the mist, the leaning trunk, the way morning arrives as a colour among columns of pine. Look past the anecdote and the forest is still there, older than the joke. Shishkin’s sincerity, Churak says, is free of sentimentality: vigour, not cuteness. The bears are guests. The host is fog in a wood.

Rain in an Oak Forest, 1891, is the other weather. Wet bark, a dim green roof, figures on a soaked path. Churak reads in it the melancholy of a rainy day, a late leaning toward landscapes of mood — old parks, still ponds, abandoned mills — without a desertion of his own grammar. Meticulous drawing remains. What changes is the humidity of feeling. If Rye is noon’s pride, this is afternoon’s damp. He is not Levitan. He will not let the rain dissolve the oaks into a single emotion. He will, however, let you feel the day in your clothes. The epic forest has a climate now, not only a census of leaves.

In the Wild North, 1891, in Kyiv, is almost a confession of friendship. A lone pine, snow, a cliff, moonlight — a Romantic vertical after so many democratic thickets. The title echoes Lermontov’s lyric. Churak says the dazzling treatment derived from Arkhip Kuindzhi, a close friend, who even dotted a red gleam in the distance and thereby stretched the space. Winter had become a Shishkin subject: the Russian Museum’s Winter of 1890, monochrome snow and dark trunks, the season’s “stability, grandeur and monumentality.” He was not the first to paint Russian winter. He was the one who could make a single pine on a rock look as immovable as a mast-tree grove. Kuindzhi’s spark is a small fact. The pine is the rest of the fact.

In Countess Mordvinova’s Forest, also 1891, is the late interior Churak calls one of his most heartfelt lyrical pictures: fir trunks in a nearly musical rhythm, greens enlivened by evening gold. No bears. No rye. No cliff. A path, a measured going-in. The 1890s still produced monumental work — the Kama near Yelabuga, a forest graveyard that looks less like death than like quiet — and a last great pine picture, Mast-tree Grove of 1898 in the Russian Museum, which Churak reads as a summing up: stillness, vigour, lucid simplicity. He remained a Peredvizhnik. In 1896 he wrote to Viktor Vasnetsov of the Society’s path as one to be proud of. On 20 March 1898, New Style, he died at the easel, in front of a painting Churak names Silvan Kingdom. The death is of a piece with the credo she quotes: inspiration is work itself.

Drawing was never a servant of the oils. Churak lingers on the sheets: pencil that can be only line, hatch and stump for depth, pen-and-ink in which he had no equal at the time, etching plates altered so the same motif could change its weather. In 1891 a solo exhibition at the Academy showed three hundred studies and two hundred drawings — a fraction of the portfolio. The studies, she says, often have a wholeness of their own, found in nature rather than assembled later. That habit is why the finished forests do not feel like theatre sets. A stump is not an accessory. It is a sitting. The visitor who only knows Morning in a Pine Forest from a wrapper has met the plot and missed the drawing that made the mist believable. Look at a foreground blade in Rye or a wet trunk in the oak rain and the “tsar of the woods” is suddenly a man with a pencil who refused to stop.

He was, Britannica notes, trained at the Moscow School from 1852 to 1856 and at the Academy from 1856 to 1860, with a gold medal and a stipend that took him to Munich, Prague, and Düsseldorf. Churak fills the German years: Schirmer’s landscape class as a magnet, animal painting tried under the Adam brothers and Koller and then given up, a View in the Environs of Düsseldorf that earned him the title of academician in 1865. France, on that first trip, seemed unfinishable, better as sketch than as picture. He learned to value Corot and Rousseau later, in 1878, when his own manner was already set. The foreign years matter because they did not make him a German painter. They confirmed that a national landscape was a serious subject. Yelabuga had proposed it. Düsseldorf, without meaning to, agreed.

Churak’s contrast with the lyrical line — Savrasov, Vasiliev, Levitan — and with Kuindzhi’s personal romance is the map to hang in the mind. Two democratic landscapes, she writes: the emotional, and the epic that is Shishkin. Epic, here, is not battle. It is the decision that a forest can be narrated like a life, detail by detail, without a hero in a hat. Kramskoi’s “objective” is the same thought from the other side of a friendship. Levitan will give you the hour. Shishkin will give you the species. A culture that has both is richer than a culture that must choose. The visitor who finds him old-fashioned is often asking the forest to be a mood first. He asked it to be itself first. The mood, when it comes — rain, moonlight, evening gold among Mordvinova’s firs — arrives as weather in a real wood, not as a feeling in search of trees.

Work, for him, was the ethic as well as the method. “To work! To work every day … No use to wait for so-called ‘inspiration’ … Inspiration is work itself!”: Churak gives that as his credo. The death at the easel is the credo kept. Mast-tree Grove, painted the same year, looks back at the 1872 pine forest and, she says, simplifies it into a last vigour. You need not see that canvas to understand the sentence. Backwoods already put you inside. Rye already let the country be a field. The late firs and the rain only prove he could change the humidity without changing the loyalty. A clerk’s desk refused in 1848 becomes, fifty years later, a life that ended still looking. That is not a moral for children. It is a fact about how a Russian forest got into paint and stayed.

Begin with Rye if you want the country as a field you could walk. Stay for Backwoods if you want to be taken inside and left among wet trunks. Morning in a Pine Forest is allowed, even required, once you have agreed to look at the mist harder than at the cubs. Noon. Near Moscow is the early claim that home is enough. The oaks — grove and rain — are the tree as architecture and as weather. In the Wild North is the moonlit exception that proves the woods could also dream. He is the painter who asked, after Aivazovsky’s seas, why the forest would not paint as well, and then spent a life proving that it would. After him, a Russian pine is never only timber. It is a sentence that took decades to write, one needle at a time.