Ivan Nikolayevich KRAMSKOY  1837 — 1887

Іван Миколайович КРАМСЬКОЙ • Иван Николаевич КРАМСКОЙ

Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy was born in 1837, into the family of a provincial state clerk, Kramskoy had no opportunity to study art during childhood. At the age of 15 he became an apprentice to an icon-painter, a year later he moved to Southern Russian and traveled extensively with a photographer for who he worked as a retoucher . 1857 he began his studies at the Academy of Arts in St.Petersburg. In 1863, he was among the 14 best graduates expelled from the Academy for refusal to fulfill the diploma work on a given mythological theme. With these students Kramskoy organized the Artists Artel in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Artel, which was successful for over 10 years, was an artists commune, the members accepting any work that came their way and sharing the profit. In 1870 Kramskoy organized, inspired and headed the first independent artistic organization - the Itinerants’ Society of Traveling Exhibitions (“The Wanderers” – “Peredvizhniki”) which played an important part in the development of art in Russia. He is known mainly as a portrait artist and is probably the most important portraitist in the history of Russian art. He portraits of the 1860s are medium size and mostly monochrome. 1863-68 Kramskoy taught at The Drawing School of the Society for Promotion of the Artists His students included Ilya Repin and Valentin Serov. In 1869 a famous Russian collector Pavel Tretyakov started to commission from Kramskoy portraits of prominent personalities in Russian culture and science. Through his paintings, he shepherded the entire nation toward an appreciation for stark realism and Russian nationalism. In 1869, St. Petersburg Academy appointed him as an academician. The same year he visited Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Düsseldorf, Antwerp, Paris, and Vienna, where he studied famous art collections. After his return to Russia he started organizing the Itinerants’ Society of Traveling Exhibitions. In 1872 Kramskoy painted one of his best paintings Christ in the Wilderness and in 1883 his most famous work “Unknown Woman”. Kramskoy’s works embody the high moral and social ideals of his time. He is meaningful not only as an artist, but as the man who laid the way to the flourishing of Russian art represented by Repin, Serov, Surikov, Vasnetsov and other outstanding Russian masters. Kramskoy died in 1887.