 spring of 1861 he went to Yelabuga, where he did a good deal of painting in the countryside.
Shishkin finally went abroad in 1862. Berlin and Dresden left him cold. All he felt was homesickness (“why am I not in Russia, that I love so?”). Shishkin came to life, however, in Prague. The artist was impressed by the drawings of “Slavonic types” by the great Czech realist of the 1860s, Joseph Manes. In 1863 in Zurich Shishkin visited the studio of the painter and engraver Sir Robert Collier, where he learned about the technique of etching. Later he became a master of lithography and etching. The mountain scenes of Switzerland were new ground for the artist, and he produced dozens of sketches.
In 1865 Shishkin returned to Russia and received the title of academician for the painting “View in the Environs of Düsseldorf.” Shishkin quickly slipped into the capital’s artistic circles and attended the Thursday meetings of the Artists’ Artel. He was “the loudest of all,” recalled Repin.
Shishkin’s paintings “Tree-Felling” (1867), “At Sunset” (1869) and “Midday in the Outskirts of Moscow” (1869), which reveal the distinctive beauty of the Russian landscape, foreshadowed the direction later developed by the Society of Itinerants.
In 1870 Shishkin was one of the founding members of the Society, together with Kramskoy, Perov, Savrasov, Ghe and others. Ivan Kramskoy, who rated Shishkin’s art very highly and helped him, wrote the following about Shishkin’s merits: “Shishkin simply amazes us with his knowledge... And when he has the landscape before him it’s as if he is in his element; immediately he is bold and agile and does not need to think about how, what or why... I think he is the only one among us who knows nature in a scholarly way... Shishkin is a milepost in the development of Russian landscape-painting; he is a whole school in one man.”
Shishkin agreed with the progressive, contemporary and national imagery propounded by the Itinerants, at odds with the artificiality and moribund nature of academic art. Critics called one of his first masterpieces, “Noon in the Neighborhood of Moscow” (1869), a “song of joy.” He always preferred to draw daytime scenes, full of sunlight and life as seen in “Pine Forest in Viatka Province” (1872), “Rye” (1878), “Path in a Forest” (1880), “Oaks” (1887) and “Coniferous Forest” and “Sunny Day”(1895).
At the Second Exhibition of the Itinerants, Shishkin presented the painting “In the Backwoods,” for which, in 1873, he received the title of professor. Shishkin subsequently exhibited with the Itinerants for the rest of his life.
Apart from painting, Shishkin was also a master of drawing and engraving. His drawing went through the same evolution as his painting. Those of the eighties, which were executed in charcoal and chalk, are much more expressive than the pen-drawings of the sixties. In 1891, more than 600 etudes and etchings were exhibited at the Academy. The exhibition gave a good idea of the scope of the artist who was deeply aware of and sought to express the beauty and heroic power of the Russian countryside.
Shishkin’s career culminated in the grand composition “Grove of Ship Timber” in 1898, in which the artist’s experience and mastery expressed the indelible impressions of his childhood. The painting was completed not long before the artist’s death. It depicts the Afonasov grove of ship-building timber near Yelabuga. It is his very last painting, devoted to his homeland, which he loved and glorified so sincerely throughout his life.
Shishkin had a troubled private life, twice he fell in love and married and twice his wives died. His sons also died. But he never allowed his sorrows to appear on his canvases. Shishkin died suddenly in his studio in St. Petersburg, while working on the painting “Forest Kingdom.”
The largest collections of Shishkin's work can be viewed at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
Written by Tatyana Klevantseva for RT