Brook in a Birch Forest
1883
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Location in museum
The Mikhailovsky Palace
Open the panorama of the hall in the virtual tour
Room 27 - Period Late 19th century
- CategoryLandscape
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The picture was painted in 1883 when Ivan Shishkin, the famous Russian master of the forest landscape, was at the pinnacle of his professional career. He had by then found his own creative method based on an intense analytical research of nature and its «portrayal», with exposure of all that was most typical of it. Painted freely and confidently in soft green tones, the most enchanting feature of this landscape is its vivid feeling for nature. The combination of exact drawing with minutely developed and faithfully depicted colours reveals all the peculiarities of the various plant forms. Russian Museum: From Icons to the Modern Times. Palace Editions, St Petersburg, 2015. P. 245.
lvan Shishkin always sought a detailed narrative in his landscapes. The thick grass, supple trunks, dense foliage penetrated by the sunlight and the sunlit meadow in the depths evoke a joyous air and a sense of the power of nature. This general mood is intensified by the figures of the peasant women walking along the stream in search of mushrooms. The period of summer blossom was the most developed and popular motif in the art of lvan Shishkin. This optimistic work links ideas of the abundance of nature to the concepts of human happiness and contentment. Brook in a Birch Forest was painted in the most prolific period of the master’s oeuvre, when he was increasingly aspiring towards greater painterly freedom.