Ivan Shishkin was born in 1832 in the old city of Elabuga on the banks of the Kama River. However, the desire to connect his life with art made him leave his native land for Moscow.

Russian nature was the main inspiration for Ivan Shishkin. He was one of the first Russian artists to travel out of town and paint landscapes from nature. To achieve detailed accuracy, the artist carefully studied everything he depicted: pieces of bark, velvety moss, fern branches, and the finest blades of grass. ‘The image of everything that has life is the main difficulty of art’, Shishkin wrote in his memoirs. He painted ‘Landscape with a Stump’ with the same verisimilitude and truthfulness to nature.

Shishkin viewed the nature of Russia as vast, powerful and majestic. Therefore, he preferred to paint large-scale canvases — endless fields, centuries-old trees, dense forest thickets.

The skillful painter made the simplest and most familiar things look solemn in his canvases. And he created the composition in such a way as to depict the objects from the most advantageous and interesting viewpoint.

Shishkin deliberately chose only those properties and states of nature that had constancy in them. Therefore, in his paintings, coniferous forests appear more often than deciduous ones, and summer noon occurs more often than other times of the day.