le 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 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 