Shishkin spent his childhood amidst the century-old forests and majestic rivers of the Ural and Volga regions and his love for these places remained with him throughout his life.
Ivan Shishkin is one of the greatest landscape painters. He pictured both Urals forests and sometimes only one big tree. Hereby he wanted to show the greatness of the Russian nature and forest.
At the same time the Shishkin's pictures contain simplicity and natural of composition. In his pictures Shishkin in detail showed the life of every bush, tree, grass, flower and gave a wide look to the Russian nature:
Oaks (1887).
A highly esteemed master of Russian realist landscape painting, Shishkin's creative method was based on exhaustive, analytical studies and on a kind of "portraiture" of nature that exposed its most typical features.
