Shishkin's Midday near Moscow

The third example is an extensive landscape that incorporates some features of the intensive type, and illustrates how the elements of landscape imagery can be manipulated to project what the painter wishes to convey. Shishkin's Midday. Near Moscow

One of the best known Russian landscape painters, Ivan Shishkin (1832-98), produced a fascinating work (on the right) that combines in one canvas the extensive view of the Russian landscape with some elements of the intensive view, in particular the small-scale, casual presence of water that so many painters of his generation raised to the emblematic level. Its title is Midday. Near Moscow, and its importance to his vision of Russia may be judged from the fact that it occupied him for much of his creative life. Three-quarters of this scene is sky, and the landscape is an expanse of cornfields traversed by a rutted cart-road that recedes into the background. A large river crosses the scene, mostly hidden in its valley, but a bend of it becomes visible just below the skyline. Water is present on a small scale as part of the road: it puddles in the ruts, drawing attention to the rough, muddy and water-logged thoroughfare which is so characteristically Russian that it has been repeatedly celebrated, both positively and negatively, in more than a hundred years of Russian literature and art. On the left is another example of a water-logged road, A. K. Savrasov's Country Road (1873).

In his Midday. Near Moscow Shishkin brings together several of the landscape elements that for painters of his age constituted the "visual vocabulary" of Russia:

The flat countryside, overwhelmed in the pictorial space by the sky.
The road that leads the eye back through the flat landscape.
The river that completes the the visual line of the road, and fulfills the suggestion made by its wet surface.
The water-filled ruts, which hint at the puddle or pond that was used to undermine the grand landscape.
The expansive field of wheat or rye, symbol of agricultural Russia, punctuated by a clump of weeds in the left foreground.
The human habitation in the distance, dwarfed by the scale of the landscape.

The composition of the painting is carefully contrived to bring all the elements together:

Two horizon lines establish the depth of the landscape, separating it into the sky, a distant landscape across which a river flows, and a near landscape consisting of a cultivated field through which runs a road.
The winding line of the road in the foreground recedes from the viewer to join the curve of the distant river.
The geometrical arrangement of the edges of the field leads the eye into the center of the picture, to the road and the people on it.
Each level of the view is marked by a prominent detail that is one of the frequently recurring landscape images. The increasing size and conventional importance of these details is contradicted as their apparent size in the picture decreases with distance:
- The foreground is anchored by a clump of weeds that stands out from the crops.
- In the middle ground a group of people stands out from the road and the crops.
- In the background a cluster of distant buildings, including a church, projects from the first horizon line and breaks the second.
All of this applies only to the lowest quarter of the painting, and the basis for the whole composition is the dominant proportion of sky to earth (three-to-one).

What we see here in the overlapping of road and river, river and puddle, crops and weeds, is something similar to the phenomenon known in iconography as "conflation", the commingling of more than one figure or attribute in order to invoke all the values that they symbolize in as few distinct images as possible. Using a visual language very like that of many icons that pull together the strands of a long spiritual and theological tradition, Shishkin's Midday summarizes a vision of the Russian landscape that is at once patriotic, poetic and realistic. Its execution is flawlessly "European", but the selection and arrangement of landscape features answer to a Russian agenda. The scale and openness of the Russian land, the contrasting appeal of its small and homely details, its mighty rivers that provide an alluring link to other lands, and its muddy roads that are terminally local... All of this is being manipulated to convey a sense of Russian identity that applies to more than just the landscape.

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