1776-1857 Russian painter. He was born a serf and in 1790 was apprenticed to a pastrycook in St Petersburg. From 1793 he attended classes at the Academy of Art there, in 1799 becoming a pupil of the portrait painter Stepan Shchukin (1762-1828). In 1804 he was sent to work as a pastrycook and manservant on an estate in the Ukraine owned by his master, General Morkov. Tropinin's Ukrainian period (1804-21) was interrupted by frequent, often protracted, visits to Moscow. During these years he copied a great deal, drew landscapes from nature and also painted religious subjects. His early style is painterly and distinguished by freedom of execution and skill in the use of colour, but the compositions are derivative and the drawing weak: The Spinner (1820s), The Lacemaker (1823), Wedding in the Village of Kukavka, Podolsky Province and Girl with a Bird (all Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.). Portraiture, however, began to take on a more important place in his work; the best of this period is the Portrait of Arseny, the Artist's Son (1818; Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.), especially notable for its use of colour. Tropinin captured perfectly the child's spontaneous vision of the world, his sensitive spirit and openness. While in Moscow from 1813 to 1818, he portrayed a series of important cultural figures that brought him great popularity. He was freed from serfdom on 8 May 1823 and shortly thereafter he became a nominee to the Academy for his paintings The Lacemaker  Related Paintings of Vasily Tropinin :. | Lacemaker | Girl from Podillya, | Portrait of Arseny Tropinin, son of the artist, | Family portrait of counts Morkovs, | Portrait of Vasily Karatygin, |
Related Artists:
CLEVE, Cornelis van
Flemish painter, Antwerp school (b. 1520, Antwerpen, d. after 1570, Antwerpen).
Vassily Maximov
Russian 1844-1911,was a Russian painter, a prominent member of the Peredvizhniki group. Maximov was born to a peasant family in the village of Lopino near Novaya Ladoga. He became an orphan early and worked for an Iconpainting shop, where he first learned to paint. In 1863 he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts and in 1864 he became a member of an Artel of Artists created by P.N. Krestonovtsev by the example of Ivan Kramskoi. The artel existed only one year and was then disbanded. Maximov painted the Sick Child (1864) at that time, when received a Gold Medal of the Academia. He completed all the courses of the Academy in three years. In 1865 he (like the group of fourteen led by Ivan Kramskoi had done earlier) refused to take part in the competitions for the Major Gold Medal by Academia. He argued that he did not need to study abroad (that was a part of the prize) but rather would study the Russian village. Indeed, after graduation from the Academia he moved to the village of Shubino, in the gubernia of Tver, where he painted the peasant life, earning money as a painting teacher of the Princes Golenischev Kutuzov (descendants of Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov). His painting Grandmother tales (1867) was shown at a Peredvizhniki exhibition, where it won a prize and was bought by Pavel Tretyakov. In 1872 he was admitted to the Peredvizhniki group, and soon became one of its most prominent and rigorous members. Ilya Yefimovich Repin described Maximov as the most uncrushable stone in the foundation of peredvizhnechestvo. Maximov painted many paintings of the peasant life. In the last twenty years of his life, realism paintings fell out of fashion. Maximov still painted almost exclusively scenes of the peasant lives that had almost no buyers. The artist lived a life full of poverty and illnesses. He died in Saint Petersburg.
Sir John Gilbert,RA,PRWS
1817-1897