Ivan Shishkin Memorial House Museum

Born in Yelabuga to merchant parents, Ivan Shishkin studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and the St Petersburg Academy of Arts. He quickly became known as a prolific painter of the Russian landscape, particularly its forests and trees, which he treated in a distinctively realist style that would see him later associated with the Russian Society of Itinerants (also known in English as the 'Wanderers'). Infused with a deep love and respect for nature, Shishkin's paintings are monumental in scale and scope, but also so richly detailed that the artist has been nicknamed 'the accountant of leaves'.

Open as a museum since 1946, the Ivan Shishkin Memorial House Museum is surrounded by the Russian landscapes that first inspired Shishkin. Today displays nineteenth-century interiors typical of the artist's time. Several galleries also showcase photographs and archival documents relating to his life and work, as well as prints and engravings that demonstrate how Shishkin revitalised the practice of etching in late nineteenth-century Russia.