Curated category
19th-century painters from the Russian Empire
- Dmitry LevitzkyDmitry Grigoryevich Levitzky walked into the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1770 with six portraits, and walked out a famous man.
- Ivan ArgunovIvan Petrovich Argunov entered the world in 1729 as a serf bound to the Counts Sheremetev. He grew up within the household of his uncle, Semyon Mikhaylovich…
- Alexander Andreyevich IvanovAlexander Andreyevich Ivanov spent twenty years painting a single picture. Not sketching it, not revising it occasionally, but devoting the full sweep of his…
- Ilya RepinIlya Repin painted a dying man in four sittings. The subject was Modest Mussorgsky, one of Russia's greatest composers, ravaged by alcoholism and depression.
- Kazimir MalevichKazimir Malevich hung a black quadrilateral painting in the upper corner of a room in Petrograd, the very spot Russian households reserved for sacred icons.
- Karl BryullovKarl Bryullov was born on the 23rd of December 1799 in St. Petersburg, into a family already steeped in the visual arts.
- Natalia GoncharovaNatalia Goncharova was born on the 3rd of July 1881, the same year as Picasso and Fernand Leger, in the small village of Nagaevo in what is now the Chernsky…
- Mikhail VrubelMikhail Vrubel arrived at a Kiev train station in 1884 dressed like a young Venetian from a Tintoretto painting: black velvet costume, short trousers…
- Vladimir BorovikovskyVladimir Borovikovsky arrived in Saint Petersburg in the autumn of 1788 carrying a name that still sounded of the Ukrainian steppe.
- Ivan AivazovskyIvan Aivazovsky was born Hovhannes Aivazian in Feodosia, a Black Sea port city on the Crimean peninsula, the son of an Armenian merchant family that had…