Composition on Shishkin’s painting “Morning in the Pine Forest”


Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin – an outstanding Russian landscape painter. He created many paintings on which he sings the beauty and poetry of his native spaces. Endless forest dalies, sun-drenched birch and oak groves, mighty ship pines…. In his canvases, a diverse plant world is amazingly and realistically captured, which seems to come to life under the master’s brush, breathes, gives us freshness and coolness, brings out the evening sadness, or, on the contrary, awakens a bright joy from the contemplation of the beautiful. The painting “Morning in the Pine Forest” is known to many of us and is loved from childhood. No wonder she is considered one of the best works of Shishkin.

The picture shows a large family of bears. In the early summer morning three little cubs and their mother-bear went out for a walk. The sun is just rising. It gently illuminates the tops of huge pines. A dense fog envelops the forest. It will soon dissipate from the sun’s

rays. In a small clearing, where the bears gathered, it almost melted.

Animals wandered into the coniferous forest and accidentally discovered an old withered tree that broke during a recent storm. His trunk cracked in two, and huge roots even twisted the ground.

Bear cubs, depicted in the picture, are brown. They are still not quite big, mischievous, sloppy. Two of them have white collars around their necks. The bravest of them climbed almost to the very top of the trunk of the broken tree and hung at its very edge, clawed at the rough bark, so that it would fall into a ravine. And the second got only until the middle. He, probably, also wants to climb higher, but scary. Here he is, clumsy, and sat down on a tree, looking helplessly at her mother-bear, does not know what to do next. The third, most cautious, climbed the other half of the broken tree, which fell on the slope of the ravine, but did not roll into it, but caught on branches by the trunk of the neighboring pine. The little bear cautiously stood on its hind legs, tilted his head slightly and listened to the sounds of the waking forest, peering

into the thick fog. There, in the fog,

Dipper is big, shaggy, brown. Like any mom, she worries about her mischievous cubs, who are playful and restless. She even growls and probably warns them that they can fall off the tree and should be careful. Or maybe she noticed some danger and wants to warn her about her kids. It’s time to finish the morning walk and go deep into the forest. She rushes from one bear to another, the dark green grass beneath it is trampled.

The artist skillfully conveys the atmosphere of the early morning in the forest. Soft diffused light falls through the thick crowns of trees and seems golden. In the background, the fog is a shroud, through which the trunks of pine trees are guessed. Thanks to a slightly blurry background, all the attention of the audience is focused on the bear family.

I really like this picture, because it depicts a funny and lively story, and the cubs are so cute and funny. And I want to play with them, pat on soft brown fur!


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Composition on Shishkin’s painting “Morning in the Pine Forest”