Woodland Edge with Wildflowers

Shishkin painted this work during the mature period of his career, when he had fully consolidated the approach that made him the defining voice of Russian landscape painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. A founding member of the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, the progressive realist exhibition society that broke from the Imperial Academy to bring art directly to the Russian public, Shishkin used the forests of central Russia as both subject and argument: that the native landscape was worthy of the same sustained, serious attention European painters gave to the Rhine valley or the Fontainebleau forest. His method was closer to the Barbizon School than to the emerging Impressionism of his French contemporaries; he painted with disciplined, descriptive brushwork built up in careful layers rather than broken color, and he made extensive preparatory studies from nature before committing to a final canvas. Works from this period circulated widely through Peredvizhniki traveling exhibitions reaching Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and provincial cities, and they shaped the visual imagination of an entire generation of Russian viewers who had never before seen their own countryside treated as high art.