KRAMSKOY ✿

Ivan Nikolaevič Kramskoj or Kramskoy (Ostrogožsk, 8 June 1837 – Saint Petersburg, 6 April 1887) was a Russian painter and art critic, he was also the intellectual leader of the Peredvižniki between 1860 and 1880.

Coming from a poor middle-class family, from 1857 to 1863 he studied at the Imperial Academy of Art, later he opposed academic art and was one of the initiators of the revolt of the fourteen which ended with his expulsion from the academy, due from this they created the group of Painters' Artel ("Артель художников").

Embracing the democratic ideas of revolutionary Russia, Kramskoj asserted the principles of realism, moral substance and nationality of art. He became one of the founders and intellectual leader of the Peredvižniki group. Between 1863 and 1868 he taught at the drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of Applied Arts. He painted several portraits of famous Russian writers, scientists, artists and public figures, such as Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy in 1873, Ivan Ivanovič Šiškin in 1873, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov in 1876, Mikhail Evgrafovič Saltykov-Shčedrin in 1879 (all currently in the Tretyakov Gallery) and Sergei Botkin in 1880 (property of a private collection in Moscow). One of his most important paintings is Christ in the Desert from 1872 (also preserved in the Tretyakov Gallery) which takes up the humanistic tradition of Alexander Ivanov.