Ivan Kramskoi

In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Nikolayevich and the family name is Kramskoi.

Ivan Kramskoi
Иван Крамской
Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoi, 1882, oil on canvas, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Born	27 May [O.S. 8 June] 1837 Ostrogozhsk, Voronezh Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	5 April 1887(1887-04-05) (aged 49) St. Petersburg, Russian Empire
Resting place	Tikhvin Cemetery, St. Petersburg
Education	Mikhail Tulinov Alexey Markov
Alma mater	Imperial Academy of Arts (1863)
Notable work	The Mermaids (1871) Christ in the Desert (1872) Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1883)
Movement	Realism, Peredvizhniki
Patron(s)	Pavel Tretyakov

Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi (Russian: Иван Николаевич Крамской; 8 June [O.S. 27 May] 1837 – 5 April [O.S. 24 March] 1887) was a Russian Realist painter and art critic. He was an intellectual leader of the art movement known as the Wanderers between 1860 and 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 the 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. In 1871, ten years after Taras Shevchenko's death, Kramskoi created a portrait of the poet that became widely popular. 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 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 realist art and aesthetics in Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century.

Kramskoi was considered an eccentric for giving his works to customers in expensive frames and not charging money for it. He died from an aortic aneurysm while working at his easel, aged only forty-nine.

Gallery

• 
  The Mermaids, 1871
• 
  Taras Shevchenko, 1871
• 
  Old man with a crutch, 1872
• 
  Christ in the Desert, 1872
• 
  Leo Tolstoy, 1873
• 
  Pavel Tretyakov, 1876
• 
  Ivan Shishkin, 1880
• 
  Maria Feodorovna, 1880s
• 
  Portrait of a woman reading, 1881
• 
  Mina Moiseyev, 1882
• 
  Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1883
• 
  Vladimir Solovyov, 1885
• 
  Alexander III, 1886

Further reading

• Kramskoi, Ivan N. (1965–1966). Goldstein, Sofya N. [in Russian] (ed.). Крамской: Письма. Статьи (2 vols.) (in Russian). Moscow: Iskusstvo.
• Goldstein, Sofya N. (1965). Иван Николаевич Крамской (in Russian). Moscow: Iskusstvo. OCLC 7262671.
• Valkenier, Elizabeth K. (1996). "Kramskoy, Ivan (Nikolayevich)". In Turner, Jane (ed.). The Dictionary of Art. Vol. 18. New York: Grove's Dictionaries. pp. 438–439. ISBN 1-884446-00-0. LCCN 96013628. OCLC 1033666240 – via the Internet Archive.

External links

• Ivan Kramskoi at the Russian Academy of Arts' official website
• Ivan Kramskoi's gallery and biography
• Ivan Kramskoi Gallery at MuseumSyndicate Archived 2015-09-12 at the Wayback Machine