Ivan Shishkin attended the Petersburg Academy of Arts from 1856 to 1860,
completing his studies with the highest honors and a gold medal. Five
years later, in 1865, he attained the rank of member of the Academy, and
then in 1873 that of professor He also headed in 1894-1895 and in 1897
the landscape painting class at the Higher Art School affiliated with
the Academy of Arts.
Before
he received these professional honors,
Shishkin lived and worked abroad
in Switzerland and Germany (1862-1865), spending half a year in the
Zurich workshop of R. Roller and residing in Dusseldorf for one year,
Upon his return to Petersburg, Shishkin became one of the founding
members of the Circle of the Itinerants, and he joined the Society of
Russian Watercolorists. Among the exhibitions in which his works were
included were those at the Academy of Arts, the All Russian Exhibition
in Moscow in 1882, the Nizhnii Novgorod in 1896, and the World Fairs
held in Paris (1867 and 1878) and Vienna (1873).
A
highly esteemed master of Russian realist landscape painting, Shishkin's
creative method was based on exhaustive, analytical studies and on a
kind of "portraiture" of nature that exposed its most
typical features. Distinguished for his forest landscapes,
Shishkin is
known not only as a painter but also as an outstanding draftsman and
printmaker.
