Russian Painter, 1832-1898
was a Russian landscape painter closely associated with the Peredvizhniki movement. Shishkin was born in the town of Elabuga of Vyatka Governorate (today Republic of Tatarstan), and graduated from the Kazan gymnasium. He then studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture for 4 years, then attended the Saint Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts from 1856 to 1860, graduating with the highest honors and a gold medal. He received the Imperial scholarship for his further studies in Europe. Five years later Shishkin became a member of the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg and was professor of painting from 1873 to 1898. At the same time, Shishkin headed the landscape painting class at the Higher Art School in St. Petersburg. For some time, Shishkin lived and worked in Switzerland and Germany on scholarship from the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts. On his return to Saint Petersburg, he became a member of the Circle of the Itinerants and of the Society of Russian Watercolorists. He also took part in exhibitions at the Academy of Arts, Related Paintings of Ivan Shishkin :. | The lawn in the forest | Landscape | Edge of Forest | Silver birch and mountain ash | Forest | Related Artists:
Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi (June 8 (O.S. May 27), 1837 ?C April 6 (O.S. March 24), 1887; was a Russian painter and art critic. He was an intellectual leader of the Russian democratic art movement in 1860-1880.
Kramskoi came from a poor petty-bourgeois family. From 1857 to 1863 he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts; he reacted against academic art and was an initiator of the "revolt of fourteen" which ended with the expulsion from the Academy of a group of its graduates, who organized the Artel of Artists
Influenced by the ideas of the Russian revolutionary democrats, Kramskoi asserted the high public duty of the artist, principles of realism, and the moral substance and nationality of art. He became one of the main founders and ideologists of the Company of Itinerant Art Exhibitions (or Peredvizhniki). In 1863-1868 he taught at the drawing school of a society for the promotion of applied arts. He created a gallery of portraits of important Russian writers, scientists, artists and public figures (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1873, Ivan Shishkin, 1873, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov, 1876, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, 1879, Sergei Botkin, 1880) in which expressive simplicity of composition and clarity of depiction emphasize profound psychological elements of character. Kramskoi's democratic ideals found their brightest expression in his portraits of peasants, which portrayed a wealth of character-details in representatives of the common people.
In one of Kramskoi's most well known paintings, Christ in the Desert (1872, Tretyakov gallery), he continued Alexander Ivanov's humanistic tradition by treating a religious subject in moral Cphilosophical terms. He imbued his image of Christ with dramatic experiences in a deeply psychological and vital interpretation, evoking the idea of his heroic self-sacrifice.
Aspiring to expand the ideological expressiveness of his images, Kramskoi created art that existed on the cusp of portraiture and genre-painting ("Nekrasov during the period of 'Last songs,'" 1877-C78; "Unknown Woman," 1883; "Inconsolable grief," 1884; all in Tretyakov gallery). These paintings disclose their subjects' complex and sincere emotions, their personalities and fates. The democratic orientation of Kramskoi's art, his acute critical judgments about it, and his persistent quest for objective public criteria for the evaluation of art exerted an essential influence on the development of democratic art and aesthetics in Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century.
T.Dart WalkerIllustrator and marine artist
American ,1869-1914
Jan van NoordtDutch Baroque Era Painter, 1620-1676