Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin was born in 1832 in Yelabuga. Even as a child, he was imbued with the beauty of the endless forests of his native Vyatka province and the expanses of the Kama River stretching into the distance. Later in life, reading and thinking a lot about art, Ivan Ivanovich came to the conclusion that an artist must study nature and follow it.

In 1852, he went to enroll in the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture. There Ivan Shishkin went through an advanced school of drawing and painting. In 1856, he entered the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, where he became friends with future painters Alexander Vasilievich Gine and Pavel Pavlovich Dzhogin. In his first year of study, Shishkin was awarded two silver medals, and later — a Grand silver and a Small gold ones.

Ivan Ivanovich graduated from the Academy of Arts in 1860, with a Grand Gold Medal. Subsequently, he traveled to Europe, where he studied the works of local artists. In 1865, the artist was awarded the title of academician. Since that time, the most fruitful period of the painter’s work began.

Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin was a skillful artist, he brilliantly mastered the technique of lithography and was rightfully considered an outstanding etcher of his time. According to the book “Detailed Dictionary of Russian Engravers of the 16th–19th Centuries” by the real privy councilor Dmitry Alexandrovich Rovinsky, a contemporary of Shishkin, the latter created about a hundred etchings by 1892.

A little-known work by Ivan Ivanovich — an etching “In the Forest Thicket” from the collection of the Gorlovka Art Museum — was completed in 1880. The artist made five prints. In this work, the artist turned to his favorite motif of the wilderness. Not a single detail of the dense forest passed his attention. Aptly, with a system of small strokes, Ivan Shishkin conveyed the illuminated and shaded areas of the forest. The artist carefully worked out powerful boulders covered with moss, fragile birch leaves, dry branches of fir trees, and forest grass.

In his work, Ivan Ivanovich managed to skilfully display popular ideas about Russian nature and the Russian forest. That is why Shishkin is called one of the leading representatives of Russian realistic landscape painting of the second half of the 19th century.