Human figures are rare visitors in Shishkin’s works. He preferred to write nature, living by its natural laws, not distorted by human activities.
In extreme cases, he gives only signs of a close or not very close human presence – in the form of a trampled road, a hedged hedge, etc. But sometimes people all the same appear in his landscapes – usually “cultivated”. Then the picture ceases to be a pure landscape and, supplemented by elements of a living genre scene, turns out to be in the genre borderland.
Such, for example, canvases “Landscape with a Hunter”, 1867 and “Walk in the Woods”, 1869. In the first case, a person is practically lost in the northern landscape; in the second, on the contrary, people become the semantic center that turns work into a typical genre.
