Ivan Shishkin

Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (Russian: Иван Иванович Шишкин, 13 (25) January 1832 – 8 (20) March 1898) was a Russian landscape painter closely associated with the Peredvizhniki movement.

Russian landscape painter, artist, draftsman and printmaker. Academician (1865), professor (1873), head of landscape workshop (1894-1895) of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. Founder and member of the Peredvizhniki movement. Master of lithography and etching. Outstanding landscape master, he inherently combines romanticism and realism features in his paintings and graphics.

The works of this outstanding artist enjoy vast popularity in Russia; the best of them have become the classics of Russian landscape painting. During 40 years of his artistic activity Ivan Shishkin produced hundreds of paintings, thousands of studies and drawings and a large number of engravings. For contemporaries, Shishkin’s personality embodied Russian nature itself; they called him “forest tzar”, “old pine tree”, and “lonely oak”.

Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin was born in the town of Elabuga of Vyatka Governorate (today Republic of Tatarstan) into the family of a merchant, and graduated from the Kazan gymnasium.

His father, a self-made and broad-minded man, after long hesitations, supported his son's desire to become an artist. In 1852-1856, Shishkin studied in the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, in 1856-1860, he continued his studies in St. Petersburg, in the Imperial Academy of Arts. He made rapid progress and got all the awards the Academy offered. Having received a Major Gold Medal for two pictures with the same name View of Valaam Island. Kukko (1860) and an Academy grant for studies abroad, Shishkin spent 3 years (1862-1865) in Germany, Switzerland, Czech, France, Belgium and Holland. Gradually he got disappointed in his foreign teachers and European authorities in landscape painting. Now he felt free and independent and longed to return home, to Russia.

During his stay abroad Shishkin engaged in lithography and etching. His numerous pen drawings caught the eye of the Dusseldorf public and critics by their virtuoso hatching and filigree treatment of detail. In 1865, Shishkin painted his View near Dusseldorf for which he was awarded the title of Academician and which was shown at the 1867 World Fair in Paris.

In 1865, he returned to Russia and settled in St. Petersburg, where he joined the Itinerants’ Society of Traveling Exhibitions (Peredvizhniki).

He also took part in exhibitions at the Academy of Arts, the All Russian Exhibition in Moscow (1882), the Nizhniy Novgorod (1896), and the World Fairs (Paris, 1867 and 1878, and Vienna,1873). Shishkin's painting method was based on analytical studies of nature. He became famous for his forest landscapes, and was also an outstanding draftsman and a printmaker.

Shishkin became a member of the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg and was professor of painting from 1873 to 1898. At the same time, Shishkin headed the landscape painting class at the Higher Art School in St. Petersburg.

He died in his studio at the easel with newly begun canvas.

Ivan Shishkin owned a dacha in Vyra, south of St. Petersburg. There he painted some of his finest landscapes. His works are notable for poetic depiction of seasons in the woods, wild nature, animals and birds.

One of his first masterpieces Noon in the Neighbourhood of Moscow (1869) critics called “song of joy”. He always preferred to draw daytime scenes, full of sunlight and life. Pine Forest in Viatka Province (1872), Rye (1878), Path in a Forest (1880), Oaks (1887), The oak grove (1887), Coniferous Forest. Sunny Day (1895). His scrupulous reproduction of nature stood in sharp contrast to the academic canons of landscape painting. For his loving approach to detail some critics called his works colored pictures, which lack of life. But despite such attention to details Shishkin’s paintings do not fall apart, but give full and finished impression.

As his best masterpieces such pictures are considered also: Morning in a Pine Forest (1889), In the northern wilderness... (1891), In a wood of countess Mordvinovoj. Peterhof (1891), Rain in an oak wood (1891), Pine Forest in Sestroretsk (1896) and others.

Some of his pictures - Rye (1878), Amidst the open valley... (1883), Wood distances (1884) – are naturally perceived as romantic - symbolical images of Russia.

Shichkin had a troubled private life, twice he fell in love and married and twice his wives died. His sons also died. But never Shishkin allowed his sorrows appear on his canvases. His last work is Mast-Tree Grove (1898).

Among the Russian landscape painters Shishkin was the staunchest and most consistent exponent of the materialistic aesthetics – to depict nature in all its pure, unadorned beauty. His role in Russian art did not lose its significance even in the years, which saw the appearance of splendid landscapes by Isaac Levitan, Valentin Serov and Constantin Korovin.