Morning in a Pine Forest. Sketch

Ivan Shishkin's Morning in a Pine Forest: Sketch (1889) is the preparatory study for one of the most famous Russian paintings ever made — the final version of Morning in a Pine Forest (1889) that depicts bear cubs playing on a fallen pine while their mother watches, painted in collaboration with Konstantin Savitsky who painted the bears while Shishkin painted the forest. This sketch likely shows Shishkin's own conception of the forest setting before the addition of the animal subjects. The morning light filtering through the pine forest was his primary pictorial interest.

The morning pine forest is handled with Shishkin's characteristic precision combined with the atmospheric softness of morning light — the mist still present in the forest air, filtering and diffusing the sunlight that falls between the tree trunks. His palette captures the specific quality of pine forest at dawn: the warm gold of direct sunlight on upper trunks contrasting with the cool grey-blue of shadowed forest interior. The sketch quality allows more fluid, less finished handling than the final completed work.