Ivan
Nikolayevich Kramskoy was born into the family of a provincial state
clerk. He had no opportunity to study art during childhood. At the age of
15 he became an apprentice to an icon-painter, a year later a photographer
took him as a retoucher. Only in 1857, he managed to come to St.
Petersburg and enter the Academy of Arts. There he soon became a popular
leader among the students. In 1863, he was among the 14 best graduates who
refused to fulfill the diploma work on a given mythological theme.
Ivan
Kramskoy is famous mainly as a portraitist; his portraits of the 60s are
not large, and very often monochrome, reminding of photographs. At the
same period (1863-68) Kramskoy taught in The Drawing School of the Society
for Promoting of the Artists; his pupils, among others, were Iliya Repin
and Nicolay Yaroshenko. In 1872 Kramskoy painted his masterpiece Christ in
the Desert, a traditional topic, yet, in Kramskoy's work it acquired new
social interpretation and deep philosophical meaning. Christ in the
Desert carried the idea of man's moral duty to society and therefore it
greatly impressed the painter's contemporaries, who found a definite
affinity to their attitudes and feelings in it in the crucial period of
Russian history, which demanded personal heroism and sacrifice for the
sake of people. 'The best Christ I ever saw'- Leo Tolstoy.
In 1873
Tretyakov commissioned the Portrait of Leo Tolstoy for his gallery.
Tolstoy had refused several times. 'Please use all your charm to persuade
him ', wrote Tretyakov to Kramskoy. And Kramskoy managed to do this, the
writer and the artist were both impressed by each other's personalities.
Kramskoy painted one of the best of all Tolstoy's portraits. Tolstoy was
working on Anna Karenina at the time and he used Kramskoy's character as
one of the secondary personages in the novel - the artist Mikhailov.
The
artist died on 24 March 1887 during his work on the portrait of Doctor
Rauhphus with brush in his hand. Kramskoy's works embody the high moral
and social ideals of his time. For him, artistic truth and beauty, moral
and aesthetic values were inseparable. His works greatly influenced his
contemporaries' ideology. Today they still affect people because the
artist's attitude to life was based on love and respect of man, on his
belief in truth and justice.
