“Great Artists” - a collection about outstanding masters of painting. The book series contains more than 50 illustrations, an “exquisitely written” biography of the artist and the history of the creation of the paintings. The album is dedicated to the work of Ivan Shishkin.

Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898) can rightfully be called the greatest Russian landscape painter. There are few artists whose work has received such wide fame and universal recognition and has earned such sincere love from their compatriots. Being an unsurpassed master of landscape, Shishkin organically combined the features of romanticism and realism in his painting and graphics. In epic images, he revealed the beauty, power and richness of Russian nature. Of particular importance for Shishkin were the natural impressions received in the vicinity of his native Elabuga, Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as on the island of Valaam. The master’s early works (“View on the Island of Valaam”, “Cutting Wood”) are characterized by a certain fragmentation of forms: adhering to the traditional “scene” structure of the picture for romanticism, clearly marking the plans, he still does not achieve a convincing unity of the image. In such films as “Noon. In the vicinity of Moscow,” this unity appears as an obvious reality, primarily due to the subtle compositional and light-air-coloristic coordination of the zones of sky and earth, soil (Shishkin felt the latter especially soulfully, in this regard, having no equal in Russian landscape art) . In the 1870s, the master entered a time of unconditional creative maturity, as evidenced by the paintings “Pine Forest. Mast forest in Vyatka province" and "Rye". Usually avoiding the unsteady, transitional states of nature, the artist captures its highest summer flowering, achieving impressive tonal unity precisely due to the bright, midday, summer light that determines the entire color scale. The monumental romantic image of Nature with a capital “N” is invariably present in the paintings. New, realistic trends appear in the soulful attention with which the signs of a specific piece of land, a corner of a forest or field, or a specific tree are written down. Shishkin is a wonderful poet not only of the soil, but also of the tree, with a keen sense of the character of each species (in his notes he usually mentions not just “forest”, but “a forest of sedge, elms and partly oaks” (diary of 1861) or “spruce forest , pine, aspen, birch, linden" (from a letter to I.V. Volkovsky, 1888) With particular desire, the artist paints the most powerful and strong types of oaks and pine trees - in the stage of maturity, old age and, finally, death in the Classical windfall. Shishkin’s works - such as “Rye” or “Among the Flat Valley” (the painting is named after the song by A.F. Merzlyakov), “Forest distances” - are perceived as generalized, epic images of Russia. The artist is equally successful in both distant views and forest views. “interiors” (“Pines illuminated by the sun” “Morning in a pine forest”, where the bears were painted by K. A. Savitsky).