The order for the portrait of the Russian classic Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov came to Kramskoy from Pavel Tretyakov – the great philanthropist wanted to collect portraits of all the outstanding people of his time, and, of course, did not pass by the famous poet, editor, publicist. In 1875, Nekrasov was diagnosed with an incurable disease […]
What is beauty, how beauty and morality correlate, how to merge ethical and aesthetic in art are the subject of constant reflections of Kramskoy. And it is in the context of these reflections that one can understand the meaning of both famous and mysterious “Unknown”. In the legacy of Kramskoy, “Unknown” was destined to become […]
“Moonlit Night” is perhaps the most spectacular of Kramskoy’s “nocturnes”. A woman in a white dress sits on a bench under the tall poplars of an old moonlit park. Kramskoy gave the heroine of the painting features of similarity with Elena Tretyakova, the wife of Sergei Tretyakov (brother of the gallery founder), who bought “Moonlit […]
The portrait of Mina Moiseyev is included in a number of paintings in which Kramskoy depicted folk types. In the realistic tradition of the 19th century, it was customary to typify folk portraits. That is, each individual character represented a certain type of people. A whole encyclopedia of types of Russian life was presented by […]
Year of painting: 1904. Dimensions of the painting: 24 x 32.6 cm. Material: cardboard. Writing technique: oil. Genre: landscape. Style: post-impressionism. Gallery: City Gallery in Lenbach House, Munich, Germany.
In the last years of his life, Kramskoy was remembered by his contemporaries surrounded by young people (their grown-up children and their friends). The striving for “gratifying” (Valentin Serov’s expression), for light, air, pure colors, which took possession of the young generation of Russian artists, was not alien to Kramskoy, the patriarch of the Itinerants. […]