When Shishkin returned to St. Petersburg, he became involved with the studio of Ivan Kramskoy, and in 1871 he joined the Peredvizhniki (“The Wanderers”), where his ideas about Russian landscape painting were enthusiastically welcomed. His paintings united fidelity to nature with an individual epic style. Shishkin preferred to paint pine or oak forests in their pristine state during dry, sunny conditions. These primordially Russian landscapes—seen in paintings such as Rye (1878), Far on the Plain (1883), Distant Forest (1884), and The Oaks (1887)—are imbued with folkloric associations. The naturalistic depiction of every blade of grass paradoxically created a sensation of the majestic scale of the whole, as the entire painting was conceived as a quantitative apotheosis of separate details. The artist’s rejection of the plein air style, which was roughly impressionistic, corresponded with his belief in the constancy of Russian nature and its abiding monumental order. The absence of an airy perspective in his landscapes (the trees grow smaller the farther they stand from the viewer, according to the rules of linear perspective, but they do not lose the definition of their contours) also helped create the image of epic Russian steadfastness. In the late 1880s Shishkin fell under the influence of new artistic currents and attempted to imbue his work with “atmosphere” (Morning in a Pine Forest, 1889), but even the air in such paintings gives an impression of solidity.

Shishkin’s “portrait” of Russian nature—expansive and rich, not subject to time and not dependent on human emotion—became associated with the staunchness and power of the Russian national character and with patriotic overtones of national history. Being in this sense an incarnation of the “Russian spirit,” Shishkin’s paintings entered everyday life in Russia, becoming the decoration on candy wrappers and illustrations in textbooks.