In contrast to Academism, the realist art of the 1860s and 1870s offered new fascinating artists, and among them was the name of Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin. “He himself is an entire school, but a living school, ” this is how Ivan Kramskoy defined Shishkin. This is true, as nature itself became the artist’s workshop.

Today, we think of Shishkin not only as a strict realist or naturalist, but also as a great romantic expressing the triumph of life.

The original version of the painting “Twilight” is housed in the Kazan Art Museum. The painting belongs to the late period of the artist’s work, when, having overcome somewhat dry early landscapes, the artist was interested in conveying light and air. Take a look at how the soft twilight envelops the quiet earth and gradually thickens! Everything is motionless, everything is imbued with the majestic silent peace of nature falling asleep.

The artist skillfully combines various spatial planes. The distant plane — the forest, the trunks of trees and the sky turning pink in the distance — is painted almost cursorily, which, however, is not noticeable, as the expressive foreground overshadows the simplicity of the perspective and focuses the entire meaning of the composition on itself. Mighty trees become symbols, like slender columns. In the foreground, every twig, leaf, blade of grass is meticulously painted, but these details do not overshadow the expressiveness of the composition and the excitement that the artist experienced during the hours of creating the painting.

What is Shishkin’s charm? Why is this name known to all admirers of the Russian landscape? Maybe because his unique paintings express the ideal inherent in the artist — everything is alive, strong, rapidly growing, and life-giving. Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin said: “Nature is always new… and is always ready to give an inexhaustible supply of its gifts, which we call life.”