Mariupol (now Zhdanov) 1842 (?)-1910 St. Petersburg

Despite his lack of a formal art education, Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi became a professor and head of the landscape studio (1894-1897) in the Higher Art School affiliated with the Petersburg Academy of Arts. Prior to this, he worked for a year (1865-1866) in the general art studio of I. K. Aivazovskii in Theodosia and joined the Circle of the Itinerants (1875-1879), exhibiting with the group from 1874. He also participated in the exhibitions held by the Academy, having become an active member in 1893, and organized a number of exhibitions of his own work. Later Kuindzhi urged the creation of the Association of Artists, which remained a vital artists' group from 1908 to 1931 and eventually bore his name.

As a landscape painter who lived in the Crimea and Petersburg, Kuindzhi was one of several outstanding artists who took part in the formation of a national school of Russian landscape painting during the second half of the nineteenth century; he represents its romantic line. An emotionally charged interpretation of nature, generalized forms, intense colors and their heightened contrast, a vividly expressed decorative composition, and a search for the pictorial are all characteristic features of his art. Kuindzhi the teacher nurtured a glittering group of landscape artists, which included Nikolai Roerich, Arkadii Rylov, and Konstantin Bogaevskii, among others.