Composition on Shishkin’s painting “Sestroretsky Bor”


Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, like none of the landscape painters, was able to capture in his canvases both the character of the Russian people and the image of the national nature. In the landscape image of the artist, “the spirit and the image of the great, mighty space”, called Russia, sounds like.

In the last decade of his life, the artist is full of amazing creative power. In the domestic art was then a new topic – the theme of the forest as a symbol of Russian power. The image of the huge and impressive coniferous forest embodied all the peculiarity of the national landscape. Before us is an artist who affirms a positive ideal – the beauty and power of his native nature.

As never, the role of light in its landscapes increases, the mastery of color transfer is enriched, the very perception of nature becomes more sincere. Simple, it would seem, stories differ in the depth of emotional experience. But Shishkin’s realistic creative method, based

on a deep study of nature, remains unchanged. His admiration of nature is not dull over the years. The reviewers of mobile art exhibitions wrote that, when approaching Shishkin’s landscapes, one feels the smell of pine and wants to take a deep breath, like in a forest.

Light shadows glide along the crust, fall to the ground. The air seems to be filled with warmth. Representing those lighted, now shrouded in trunks, and in the distance trees that are visible already to the very tops, Shishkin creates the impression of a large, spacious and light forest. Cutting the frame of the treetops (a technique often encountered by the artist), it reinforces the impression of an unlimited height of trees that seem to lack space on the canvas. Magnificent slender pines are given in all their plastic beauty. Their scaly bark is written using many colors. In the picture there is not a single fragment written by an indifferent, habitually skillful hand. The artist seems to live one life with the nature depicted by him.

“The artist, copying the nature in which all incessant moves and changes, can not grasp in it at once more than one moment,” Shishkin asserted.

“at the name of I. I. Shishkin, a bright impression of a large, predominantly pine forest immediately arises in the mind, and even a characteristic pine smell is felt, so you always want to take a deep breath.” (from the reviews of contemporaries).


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Composition on Shishkin’s painting “Sestroretsky Bor”