Ivan Kramskoi

Ivan Kramskoi
Portrait of Kramskoi by Ilya Repin, 1882.
Born	Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi 27 May [O.S. June 8] 1837 Ostrogozhsk, Voronezh Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	St. Petersburg, Russian Empire
Nationality	Russian
Education	Imperial Academy of Arts
Known for	Painting
Notable work	The Mermaids (1871) Christ in the Desert (1872) Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1883)
Movement	Realism, Peredvizhniki
Awards	Gold medal winner (1863), five-times silver medal winner
Patron(s)	Pavel Tretyakov

Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi (June 8 (O.S. May 27), 1837, Ostrogozhsk – April 6 (O.S. March 24), 1887, Saint Petersburg; Russian: Ива́н Никола́евич Крамско́й) was a Russian painter and art critic. He was an intellectual leader of the Russian democratic art movement in 1860-1880.

Life

Self portrait, 1867

Kramskoi came from an impoverished petit-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 ("Артель художников").

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–philosophical 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,'" 1877–78; "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.

Gallery

File:Iwan Nikolajewitsch Kramskoj 002.jpg

The Mermaids, 1871

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  Old man with a crutch, 1872

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  Christ in the Desert, 1872

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  Portrait of painter Ivan Shishkin, 1873.

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  Leo Tolstoy, 1873

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  Ivan Shishkin, 1880

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  Maria Feodorovna, 1880s

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  Fyodor Dostoyevsky on his bier, 1881

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  Portrait of a woman reading, 1881, Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts

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  Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1883

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  Vladimir Solovyov, 1885

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  Alexander III, 1886

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  Mina Moiseyev

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  Portrait of Pavel Tretyakov (1832–1898).

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  Taras Shevchenko

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  Moonlight night by Ivan Kramskoy

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References and external links

• Ivan Kramskoi's gallery and biography
• Ivan Kramskoi Gallery at MuseumSyndicate
• (Russian) Долгополов, Игорь Викторович Мастера и шедевры: В 3 т. Т.2 — М.: Изобраз. искусство, 1987.