It would be surprising if forests did not have a special place in the visual lexicon of the Russian landscape, given how much of Russia's vast territory is forested. In Western Europe, Germany is another country where geography would make us expect forests to appear often in landscape painting. However, it isn't a foregone conclusion that this should be the case in either country. There's more to landscape painting than a reflection of geography, at least where it is art rather than topographical record (a distinction that needs to be made before the nineteenth century). It became fashionable in the nineteenth century to suppose that human cultures derive their outlook from their environment, but there is much more convincing evidence that we project our outlook onto our surroundings, and see things the way our culture prompts us to see them. In other words, religion and philosophy affect both what we choose to portray, and how we depict it and when. Forests do indeed feature in the art of both Russia and Germany, but it is not until the Romantic period that they become a popular subject, with the emphasis on their wild and dark interiors rather than their bosky margins and clearings.

In Russian art, the Romantic fascination with forests held over into the late nineteenth century, sustained by other cultural factors, including a revived interest in popular culture. Above left is In the Forest by Ivan Shishkin, dating from the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The forest here is relatively tame, with a good deal of light filtering through the trees, a clearing in the foreground, and a small herd of cows approaching on a wide path. This painting is reminiscent of a popular eighteenth-century Dutch landscape theme: a stand of trees with cows sheltering in or beside it. Russian painters were unusually familiar with Dutch landscapes, since Peter I was particularly attracted to them. Peter's collection found its way into Russia's art museums and the study collection of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts.

Shishkin's Grove of Ship-Masts (1898) creates a more specifically Russian impression, and is in fact one of Russia's best-loved landscape paintings, not least for its invocation of Peter the Great's ship-building and the glory of the navy it produced. You can click on the picture for an enlarged view.

Shishkin is better known for forestscapes of a wilder and more mysterious kind. His painting In the Depths of the Forest (1872) invokes the "Murom Forest" of folklore and fable, legendarily dark and impenetrable, full of wild beasts and spirits both good and bad, which has a firm hold on the Russian imagination to this day. Instead of a well-defined pathway into the forest, there is an opening choked with fallen logs that recedes into the gloom and defies the traveler to enter. Click on the image to enlarge it, which will make it possible to see the fox crouched on a mossy log in the lower left part of the painting, and the grouse it has flushed flying off into the darkest part of the forest.