Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin is not just an outstanding artist, but, above all, a great master of landscape painting. Most of all, the artist liked to create forest landscapes, representing beech, pine, oak forests. Shishkin loved and admired nature, beauty and power of trees, valleys, rivers. Groves, forest dalies became the favorite images of Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin. Even creating several landscapes of pine forest, the artist sought to transmit in each of them his own special state.
Landscape “Rain in the Oak Forest” was written in 1891. This beautiful landscape, a magnificent example of easel painting is part of the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery.
The plot of the landscape “Rain in the oak forest” is filled with lyrical motifs. The canvas is very poetic, subtle, contemplative. The picture shows three travelers. Two of them wander through the oak damp forest slowly, barely hiding from the rain under the umbrella. Another, a lonely traveler, without trying to hide from the rain, hastily retreats deeper into the canvas, farther and farther into a thick moist fog and forest thicket.
“Rain in the oak forest” – a landscape that is designed to convey the beauty of moist forest air, the smell of grass, oak leaves, the ghostly light of the rain, the state of the fog that fills all around with peace and quiet.
Oak forest is very beautiful, dotted with sunlight reflecting in the rain-filled forest air. The landscape is sparkling, flowing with warmth, everything is floating, breathing, living.
The depth of the forest is filled with dense milk mist. The outlines of trees in the distance seem to be dissolved in this foggy dope. The image of fog gives the canvas of mystery and easy mystery. Against the background of a whitish wall of fog, images of trees look clearer. The abundant foliage of the oaks sparkles, the through light gives the landscape a state of quiet serenity and bliss. The sun in some places slides through the powerful trunks of trees, coloring them and somewhat dissipating and softening too thick fog.
The foreground of the picture is full of details, detailed drawings of various grass, stones, moss. At the same time, the artist uses a varied palette, all this makes the reflexes and semitones more expressive and noticeable. The air is felt as a separate phenomenon, alive, trembling, unsteady, ready to melt, disappear together with this foggy mist spreading through the forest.
In general, the landscape is very soft, fragile, compositionally multidimensional. Chiaroscuro emphasizes the changing atmospheric state of nature, emphasizing the unsteady balance between the picture plans and the colorful layers of the landscape.
Shishkin’s landscape pulsates and lives in our minds not only as an image, but also as a smell, like the singing of forest birds, like forest air, like the familiar rustling rain in the forest from childhood.
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)