Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin

Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898) was a Russian landscape painter and etcher, born in Yelabuga in the Vyatka Governorate, now in Tatarstan. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and then at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, winning Academy gold medals in 1859 and 1860. After several years of study abroad, mainly in Munich, Zurich, Geneva and Düsseldorf, he returned to St Petersburg in 1866 and became an Academy professor in 1873. He was a founding member of the Peredvizhniki, the Itinerants, and became known above all for large, finely observed pictures of Russian forest and fields. Best known are Rye (1878), The Dark Wood (1876), Pine on Sand (1884), Oak Grove (1887) and Morning in a Pine Forest (1889), painted together with Konstantin Savitsky. He was also a prolific etcher. Shishkin died on 20 March 1898 in St Petersburg, reportedly while working at his easel.