This painting is exposed at the National Museum of Art of Moldova 🇲🇩 in Chisinau.
The Russian artist Ivan Shishkin is famous for his landscape paintings, especially forests.
Landscape painting is probably one of the most represented genres in Art. A forest painting usually stands out for its realism and the beauty of the motive itself : Mother Nature.
But an exceptionally talented artist and a landscape connected to history can lend the painting an evocation that goes beyond the beauty of nature. This is the case here.
« Forest in Belovjesk » represents a forest with trees at different stages of their lives : sturdy, luxuriant, fully grown, dead, fallen split by wind or other element. But more importantly, this forest, located in both Belarus and Poland is deep nand impenetrable, symbolically as deep and impenetrable as the Russian soul.
To some extent, this deep and impenetrable forest has shaped the Russian soul Russia as described by Mark Galeotti in « A Short History of Russia ».
« The difficulties of east-west travel without suitable river routes through the forest and … are probably equal explanation of any isolation… it is difficult to imagine a renaissance amid the deep forests of Russia »
