25.01.1832 – 01.04.1989

This belief the young artist Ivan Shishkin adhered to all his life. He was a true researcher of nature, radically changing the attitude to the landscape. Shishkin’s paintings are not romantic scenery, but familiar to every Russian forest and open spaces filled with deep lyricism and love for their country.

Ivan Shishkin was born January 25, 1832 in a patriarchal merchant family in the city of Elabuga. With the permission of his father in 1852, Ivan entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and four years later – to the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. In 1860, after receiving a large gold medal, Ivan Shishkin goes abroad – to Munich. He spends more than a year traveling, visiting many cities in Germany, the Czech Republic, Holland, Switzerland.

In 1870, a new association, the Association of Artistic Travel Exhibitions, Ivan Shishkin, also denied the academicism of the old school, joined the ranks of the “Wanderers”. A year later the first exhibition took place, at which the artist presented his work “Evening”. Despite the success of the professional, the artist’s personal life during these years was full of adversity – his father died, then a small son, his wife was ill. In 1874, Yevgenia Alexandrovna, the artist’s wife, died, leaving him with two children – the daughter of Lydia and the one-year-old son Constantine, who soon died too. Shishkin coped with life’s troubles with a head going into work. At the fourth exhibition of the Wanderers, he presents his new paintings – “Spring in the Pine Forest” and “First Snow.”

Ivan Shishkin tirelessly works – teaches, creates several paintings a year, but a series of tragedies in his life is repeated – just after the birth of his daughter, his second wife Olga Lagoda-Shishkina dies. The artist again goes head to head with creativity and creates such masterpieces of Russian landscape painting as “Pines, illuminated by the sun”, “Opuska”, “Fern”.

In 1897, Ivan Shishkin wrote his last picture – “Ship Grove”, the next work he completed was not to be. The artist died with a brush in front of the easel on April 1, 1898.