Morning in a Pine Forest

Ivan Shishkin was the great painter of the Russian forest, a man who studied trees the way a botanist would. Look at the bark of the pines, the roots gripping the ground, the shattered fibres of the fallen trunk, and the way the fog softens the trees at the back while the foreground stays crisp. The bears, however, were not his. His friend Konstantin Savitsky painted them, and the two men signed the picture together. When Pavel Tretyakov bought it he wiped off Savitsky's signature, saying that everything in the picture, from the idea to the manner, was Shishkin's, and so for decades the bears went uncredited.

The forest is thought to be based on the woods of the island of Gorodomlya on Lake Seliger, where Shishkin sketched, though the scene is a composition rather than a view. The painting went straight into the Tretyakov in eighteen eighty nine and has never left. Children love the cubs, but stand back and notice how the pink light of sunrise is just touching the tops of the trees, and how the whole forest seems to be waking up.

Did You Know? Pavel Tretyakov wiped Savitsky's signature off the canvas, so for years nobody knew that a second artist had painted the bears.