Ivan Kramskoi

Ivan Kramskoi (1837–1887) was born in Ostrogozhsk into an impoverished family and studied at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts from 1857 to 1863. Reacting against academic art, he was an initiator of the Revolt of the Fourteen, which ended with the expulsion of a group of graduates from the Academy, who then formed the Artel of Artists. He went on to become a founder and the public figurehead of the Peredvizhniki, the Itinerants. He held that the artist had a public duty, and that art should be realist and morally serious. He painted a gallery of portraits of Russian writers, scientists and artists, among them Tolstoy, Shishkin and Tretyakov, as well as portraits of peasants, and pictures on the border of portrait and genre such as Unknown Woman. He died of an aortic aneurysm while working at his easel, aged forty-nine. Here: Christ in the Desert, one of his best-known paintings, in which he followed Alexander Ivanov in treating a religious subject in moral and philosophical terms.