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Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin was born on January 25, 1832 in Yelabuga of Vyatka Governorate (today 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.
He studied art with a characteristic thoroughness, first at the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in Moscow and then at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1860 he was granted a stipend to travel to Munich, Prague, and Düsseldorf, to add final lustre to his art education. It was mainly the Düsseldorf school that furthered his inclination toward exact reproduction of nature and linear severity. His ink drawings were received with much acclaim in Germany, and while he was there he became familiar with the techniques of etching and lithography, which at the time had not yet gained a foothold in Russia.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 died suddenly in his studio in St. Petersburg, while working on the painting “Forest Kingdom.”
Shishkin’s “portrait” of Russian nature—expansive and rich, not subject to time and not dependent on human emotion—became associated with the staunchness and power of the Russian national character and with patriotic overtones of national history. Being in this sense an incarnation of the “Russian spirit,” Shishkin’s paintings entered everyday life in Russia, becoming the decoration on candy wrappers and illustrations in textbooks.
The largest collections of Shishkin's work can be viewed at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
In 1860 he was awarded the Academy’s Gold Medal.
A Walk in the Forest
1869Countess Mordvinov's Forest
1892Forest
1897Forest Glade (Glade)
1897Forest road
1897In the park
1897In the Wild North
1891Landscape
1898Mast Tree Grove
1897Mill in the forest. Preobrazhenskoe
1897Misty Morning
1897Morning in a Pine Forest
1889Oak Grove
1887Pond in a Old Park
1897Promenading in the Forest
1869Sandy road
1898Sketch of the painting in 1898
1898The Field of Wheat
1878Woods behind the fence
1898At the edge of a birch grove. Valaam
1860At the edge of a birch grove. Valaam
1860Hovel
1861Ivan Shishkin and A. Guinet in the studio on the island of Valaam
1860Little House in Dusseldorf
1856Oaks under Sestroretsk
1857Peasant and peddler
1855Pine on the cliff
1855Self-portrait
1854Slums (View on the island of Valaam)
1860View in the Vicinity of St. Petersburg
1856View on the Island of Valaam
1858View of Valaam Island. Kukko
1860View of Valaam Island. Kukko
1859He became a member of the Circle of the Itinerants and of the Society of Russian Watercolorists.
The artist made an impression of an extremely isolated and even sullen person. In reality Shishkin was a bright, deep, and versatile person. But only in the narrow company of close people the artist became himself.
Quotes from others about the person
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 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.
