Kuindzhi Arkhip Ivanovich (79 works)

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Kuindzhi Arkhip Ivanovich is a famous painter. Born in 1842 into the family of a shoemaker in Mariupol. He lost his parents early and lived in great poverty, tending geese, serving as a contractor for the construction of a church, then as a grain merchant; learned to read and write in Greek from a Greek teacher, then briefly attended the city school. From an early age, he developed an attraction to painting; he drew wherever he could, on walls, fences and scraps of paper. Having worked as a retoucher for photographers in Mariupol, Odessa and St. Petersburg, he painted a large picture: “Tatar hut in the Crimea,” which he exhibited at an academic exhibition in 1868, and became a volunteer student of the academy. In 1873, Kuindzhi exhibited the painting “Snow” at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, for which in 1874 he received a bronze medal at an international exhibition in London. In the same 1873, he exhibited his painting “View of the Island of Valaam” in Vienna, and “Lake Ladoga” in St. Petersburg. In 1874, at the exhibition of the Association of Traveling Exhibitions, Kuindzhi exhibited “The Forgotten Village”, in 1875 - two: “Steppes” and “Chumatsky Tract”, in 1876 - the famous “Ukrainian Night”. Critics unanimously assess the outstanding merits of his works. In 1878, "Ukrainian Night", together with "View of the Island of Valaam" and "Chumatsky Highway", appears at the World Exhibition in Paris. In 1878 he exhibited "Forest" and "Evening in Little Russia", which aroused a lot of controversy and created many imitators.

In 1879 Kuindzhi exhibited “North”, “Birch Grove”, “After the Storm”; in the same year, Kuindzhi left the exhibitions of the Wanderers Association. In 1880, he organized an exhibition of one of his paintings at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts: “Night on the Dnieper”; This exhibition was an unprecedented success, not only ordinary art critics wrote about it, but also Polonsky, Strakhov, Mendeleev, Turgenev.