Italian boy

Shishkin's Italian boy is an anomaly in his forest-dominated output — a figure study, presumably made from a model encountered during his European travels, most likely during earlier study years at the St Petersburg Academy. While Shishkin became the pre-eminent painter of the Russian forest, he received conventional academic training that included figure work, and occasional portraits or figure studies from his hand survive alongside his landscape canvases. This work, held at the Nizhniy Tagil State Museum of Fine Arts, suggests a facility with human subjects that his mature career rarely required him to exercise but which he clearly retained.

The figure is modelled with careful attention to the quality of light on a young face, with warm ochres and rose tones in the flesh contrasting with the darker background. Shishkin's brushwork in the figure passages is smoother and more blended than in his landscape work, following academic portrait conventions of the period.