Autumn on Krestovsky Island

Shishkin painted Autumn on Krestovsky Island in the mid-1890s, working in the parkland of Krestovsky Island on the Neva delta at St Petersburg, a landscape he had revisited across his career as a place where managed parkland and old-growth forest met. By this period Shishkin was the pre-eminent figure within the Peredvizhniki, the Society of Travelling Exhibitions, whose founding ideal was a Russian art rooted in the direct study of the national landscape rather than in the academic conventions of the Imperial Academy. He had already produced the canonical images of the Russian forest, including the vast oak groves and pine stands that made him famous in the 1870s and 1880s, and this late work shows a quieter, more intimate register than those heroic panoramas. The autumn park setting allowed him to explore seasonal colour and the particular quality of northern European light in October, a challenge he approached with the same empirical discipline he applied to high summer. The painting belongs to the long tradition of Russian landscape that the Peredvizhniki established and that would shortly be inherited by Levitan and his generation. It is held in the Russian museum tradition as a demonstration that the picturesque could be achieved through patient, scientifically informed observation rather than compositional invention.