Ivan Shishkin was born in 1832 into a merchant family in Elabuga, the Vyatka Governorate (on the territory of modern Tatarstan). In 1852, Shishkin entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he studied under the guidance of the portrait artist Apollon Mokritsky. Moreover, four years later, he became a student at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. According to the artist’s niece Alexandra Komarova, fellow students and even teachers noted that “Shishkin paints such views that no one else has ever painted before: just a field, a forest, a river — and he paints them as beautifully as Swiss panoramas.” In 1860, Ivan Shishkin graduated from the Academy with a major gold medal. In 1864, the artist moved to Dusseldorf, where he began working on “View in the Vicinity of Dusseldorf”. This landscape earned him the title of academician.

In the 1870s, Shishkin joined the Wanderers [Peredvizhniki] and became one of the founders of the the Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions. Ilya Repin, a celebrated Russian artist, recalled,

Ivan Shishkin painted any species and types of trees and greenery paying close attention to the smallest detail. He did not just depict plants, but endowed them with features that appeared due to the soil and climate. And these details depended on the terrain that the artist recreated on the canvas. Even the ground surface — stones, sand, clay, uneven soil overgrown with ferns and forest herbs, dry leaves, brushwood, dead wood — turned out to be very realistic in Shishkin’s paintings and drawings.

The artist wrote, 

The collection of the Chelyabinsk State Museum of Fine Arts contains several works by Ivan Shishkin. One of them, “Edge of the Forest”, is on permanent display.