This work is an excellent example of Russian Realist landscape painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ivan Shishkin painted the picture in Dubki Park, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, twenty miles from St Petersburg.
He first came here in the 1860s, when he planned to open a studio where landscapists could work in the summer. The artist was a regular visitor to the park in the 1880s, when he painted this particular canvas.

Shishkin Ivan

Shishkin, Ivan Ivanovich (1832, Yelabuga (Vyatka Gubernia) - 1898, St Petersburg)
Painter, draughtsman, engraver, landscapist. Studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1852-1855) and the Imperial Academy of Arts (1856-1860). Fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts in Germany and Switzerland (1862-1865). Worked in the studio of Rudolf Roller in Zurich (1863), painted studies in the Teutoburg Forest (1864). Lived in Dusseldorf (1864-1865). Founding member of the Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions (1870-1898). Professor (1873). Full member of the Imperial Academy of Arts (1893). Head the landscape studio at the Imperial Academy of Arts (1894-1895, 1897). Contributed to the World Exhibitions in Paris (1867, 1878), London (1872) and Vienna (1873). Lived in St Petersburg.