(born Niko Pirosmanashvili; May 5, 1862-1918) was a Georgian primitivist painter. Pirosmani was born in the Georgian village of Mirzaani to a pleasant family in the Kakheti province. His family owned a small vineyard. He was later orphaned and put in the care of his two elder sisters. He moved with them to Tbilisi in 1870. In 1872 he worked as a servant for wealthy families and learned to read and write Russian and Georgian. In 1876 he returned to Mirzaani and worked as a herdsman. Pirosmani gradually taught himself to paint. One of his specialties was painting directly into black oilcloth. In 1882 he opened a workshop in Tbilisi which was unsuccessful. In 1890 he worked as a railroad conductor, and in 1895 worked creating signboards. In 1893 he co-founded a dairy farm in Tbilisi which he left in 1901. Throughout his life Pirosmani, who was always poor, was willing to take up ordinary jobs including housepainting and whitewashing buildings. Although his paintings had some local popularity (about 200 survive) his relationship with professional artists remained uneasy; making a living was always more important to him than abstract aesthetics.  Related Paintings of Niko Pirosmanashvili :. | A Ram | Lion | Threshing floor | Giorgi Saakadze | Walking Gazelle |
Related Artists:
William Frederick Yeames,RA
1835-1918 English painter. The son of a British consul in Russia, Yeames was sent to school in Dresden after the death of his father in 1842. He also studied painting there. The collapse of the Yeames family fortune resulted in a move to London in 1848, where Yeames learnt anatomy and composition from George Scharf (1788-1860). He later took lessons from F. A. Westmacott. In 1852 he continued his artistic education in Florence under Enrico Pollastrini and Raphael Buonajuto, from whom he learnt the methods of the Old Masters. He drew from frescoes by Ghirlandaio, Gozzoli and Andrea del Sarto and painted in the Life School at the Grand Ducal Academy. He then went to Rome and made landscape studies and copied Old Masters, including Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican. His extensive study of Italian art gave him a precision and facility that assisted his artistic success upon his return to London in 1859. There he set up a studio in Park Place and became involved with the ST JOHN'S WOOD CLIQUE. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution from 1859 and became an ARA in 1866.
Jozef Chelmonski
(November 7, 1849 - April 6, 1914) was a Polish painter. Chełmoski was born in the village of Boczki near Łowicz in central Congress Poland, Russian Empire. His first drawing teacher was his father (a small leaseholder and administrator of Boczki village). After finishing high school in Warsaw, he studied in Warsaw Drawing Class (1867-1871) and took private lessons from Wojciech Gerson. From 1871 to 1874 Chełmoski lived in Munich. He worked with Polish painters assembled around Jozef Brandt and Maksymilian Gierymski. He also had studied for a few months at the academy of H. Anschutz and A. Strahuber. In 1872 and 1874 Chełmoski visited the Polish territories. Tatra Mountains and Ukraine. His first paintings were done under the influence of Gerson. The works that followed were landscapes and villages. In 1875 Chełmoski went to Paris, where he had many important exhibitions and became known to the art scene. With many orders, the artistic level of his paintings decreased. From 1878 to 1887 Chełmoski visited Poland, Vienna and Venice. In 1887 he returned to Poland and in 1889 settled in Kuklewka Zarzeczna village. Contact with his homeland and nature revealed quality in his artworks. From that time are the best liked Chełmoski's paintings such as Partridge on the Snow, The Storks or Before Thunderstorm.
Franz Skarbina
German, 1849-1910