The history of Russian art in the second half of the 19th century is firmly connected with the name of Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, an outstanding painter, wonderful draftsman and engraver, whose 175th anniversary was celebrated in 2007. In his works, the artist celebrates the greatness and beauty of his native nature, the endless expanses of its fields, golden fields, mighty oak forests, forest thickets. Shishkin was sincerely convinced that there was nothing more beautiful than the true motives of nature, that they did not need embellishment or idealization. Objectivity became the primary basis of his mature work, but behind it stood the artist's boundless passion for the beautiful and eternal face of nature. Shishkin is characterized by an accurate reproduction of nature, and at the same time he sought to move from external plausibility to generalization and typification, to a poetic understanding of the motive.