The most celebrated example in Russian art of the branch groping towards the sky is by Aleksandr Ivanov, who spent most of his career in Italy in self-imposed exile, but still came to be appreciated as not just the greatest, but one of the most "national" of Russia's nineteenth century painters. How is this possible? A careful look at the branch on the left helps to explain why. This tortured tree-limb juts into the picture, twisted and pointed slightly downward. Initially it is bare and stands out starkly against the sky. At some point it has been broken off, but from the underside of the break, new branches are growing, and it is these branches with their leafy twigs that are reaching slightly upwards again towards the sky and an idealized distant landscape. A reading of this picture as a metaphor for the spirit's struggle for survival in a hostile environment is firmly entrenched in the annals of Russian art history. The work was painted in the late 1840s. The trees in Ivanov's landscapes are consistent with this example though less extreme, and the isolated branch or tree pointing skyward is frequently met in Russian landscapes through the second half of the nineteenth century.
Ivan Shishkin is best known for his close-up or "interior" scenes of Russia's forests, but in this painting from 1884, entitled Forest Stretching into the Distance, he gives a view out over an expanse of forest reaching away to a horizon that is just above the center line of the painting. The composition is dominated by a bent and weather-beaten pine that reaches up from the foreground, across the distant forest and the horizon, and deep into the half of the painting that is sky. In a different context, it is the same visual metaphor as Ivanov's branch: a damaged limb appearing to reach higher than its surroundings.
