Painting by Shishkin First snow


How accurately noticed the Russian people that there are no rules without exception. Someone will shrug their shoulders: what am I talking about? No, I’m all right, all on the topic. Just pay attention to the picture you are about to talk about. It is difficult to assert with all categoricalness that its author is the great landscape painter Shishkin. And not because there are any doubts. Just most of the artist’s works are filled with joy, light, they seem to charge us with optimism.

And what do we see in the picture “The First Snow”? Despondency, slush, dirt, dampness, melancholy. Overabundance of despondency like a splash on the viewer, a feeling that the feet are bogged down in loose snow, mixed with muddy mud. And there is no gleam, no ray of light, no blue gleam in the gray sky. Nature seems to be worried, fearing the arrival of winter. But the fall of the autumn is not happy either. And snow, melted, forms endless puddles, the water is no longer

absorbed into the ground, and this excess of moisture weighs heavily.

The whole forest seemed to be chilled, every tree was chilled to the very core. Like a man who shakes, when his body is as cold and uncomfortable, the frost picks up to the bone. Involuntarily shudder, looking at the picture, as if the will of fate brought you into this viscous sputum.

The great artist could so naturally transmit to the viewer the state of nature that we, the distant descendants, can only admire. There is no exaggeration here, the author did not add anything artificial or unreal, as if this wet glade itself came down to him on the canvas and the sad one froze in a silent expectation of natural disasters.

And yet this Shishkin creation, this is his favorite theme, his Russian forest. No matter how life circumstances developed, no matter how the fate of the fate, but to betray his child, Shishkin could never change his native forest. And this picture is the most powerful proof of that. Despite the general melancholy and despondency in the painting “The First Snow”, the author here also leaves the viewer hope for the best – a thin path that curls in the near forest.

Today, the canvas of the Russian perverted artist is kept in Kiev, in the state museum of Russian art. I would like to hope that critics and connoisseurs of real art will appreciate it. Strange as it may seem, but so far researchers have treated Ivan Shishkin’s canvas quite smoothly.


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Painting by Shishkin First snow