Prominent Russians: Ivan Shishkin
“Russia - country of landscapes… I hope the time will come, when all Russian nature, alive and penetrated by spirit, will look from canvases of Russian artists…” - Shishkin
Ivan Shishkin started drawing as a child and continued through his life; he is said to have never parted from his pencil. Drawing was a way to study the nature. By his contemporaries, Shishkin was given the nicknames “Titan of the Russian Forest,” “Forest Tsar,” “Old Pine Tree” and “Lonely Oak,” as there was no one at that time who depicted trees more realistically, honestly and with greater love.
“Shishkin - national artist. All his life he studied Russian, mainly the northern woods, Russian trees and Russian thickets. It is his empire, and here he has no contenders, he is unique.” - Stasov
It was Russia and chiefly her native forests that became the enduring focus of his long, successful and prodigious career. Shishkin's works were greeted as the defining images of Russia that promoted a new pride in the indigenous landscape. Before Shishkin no one had narrated the love of his native town and the soft beauty of the northern nature.
The works of this outstanding artist enjoy vast popularity in Russia and all over the world and have become classics of Russian landscape painting. During the 40 years of his artistic activity Ivan Shishkin produced hundreds of paintings, thousands of studies and drawings and a large number of engravings.
This is a prime example of Shishkin's exceptional talent, which the artist Ivan Kramskoy, the Itinerants' ideological mentor, noted was of such magnitude that it constituted an historical art phenomenon: “He is by himself a school... a milestone in the evolution of the Russian landscape.”
Ivan Shishkin was born in the small provincial town of Yelabuga (today the Republic of Tatarstan). His father, a merchant, but a very broad-minded person, was a great lover of antiquity and an amateur archaeologist and folklorist. In an effort to foster his son’s interest in history he took little Shishkin to the archeological excavations of the ancient Bulgarian kingdom on the Volga, where he was helping Professor Nevostruyev from Moscow.
In 1844 Shishkin was sent to the Kazan grammar school, where he soon found friends with whom he could draw and discuss art. Shishkin studied the natural sciences with great seriousness. The set-up of the grammar school, however, was an obstacle to his aspirations and intentions and after the summer holidays of 1848 Shishkin did not return to the school. Shishkin’s autobiography gives some idea of his activities as a young man, having freed himself from the “grammar school with its narrow-minded formalism.” As he put it, “so that I would not become a clerk.”
Shishkin received a good grounding in painting and sculpture under the guidance of Mokritsky in the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture. The Artist constantly drew in the woods that were situated near Moscow (in Sokolniki). “A landscape-painter is a perfect artist. He feels more deeply, purer,” Shishkin wrote in his diary.
From 1856 to 1860 Shishkin studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts under Vorobiov. The young artist’s successes, which earned him gold and silver medals, upheld the hopes expressed by his former tutor Mokritsky when Shishkin entered the Academy: “We have lost an excellent, talented pupil, but we can expect, with time, to see him turn into an excellent artist if he continues to study with the same love at the Academy.”
Shishkin’s aspiration for a portrait-like quality in the representation of nature was already in evidence in the early painting “View of the Environs of St. Petersburg” in l856. In 1858-59 Shishkin often went to the island of Valaam, where he took practical summer courses. The majestic scenery there reminded the young artist of the natural beauty of the Urals area, where he had spent his childhood. In 1860, for two of his Valaam landscape paintings, Shishkin received a first-class gold medal and the right to go abroad. Shishkin was in no hurry to leave, however, and in the