Serhii Vasylkivsky
Encyclopedia
Serhii Vasylkivsky (October 19, 1854, Izium
— October 7, 1917, Kharkiv
) was one of the most prolific Ukrainian
artist
s of the pre-revolutionary period and an expert on Ukrainian ornamentation and folk art.
, a city in the historical region of Sloboda Ukraine
, and today's Kharkiv Oblast
. The future painter had a chumak
grandfather whose roots reached cossack
ancestral lines. Vasylkivsky's father was a writer and taught his son the aesthetics of proper calligraphy
. His mother, through her folk songs set the foundation which provided the inspiration for Vasylkivsky's art later in life.
When he was seven years old, his parents moved to Kharkiv
, which at the time was a significant cultural center of Sloboda Ukraine. Vasylkivsky's first art lessons were given at the Kharkiv gymnasium
by Dmytro Bezperchy, a student of Karl Briullov
. During the years of his study, Vasylkivsky was able to use the extensive book collection of his relative and poet, V. Alexandrov. Among these were the works by Ivan Kotlyarevsky
, Taras Shevchenko
, and Nikolai Gogol
, which made a strong impression on the young artist. After five years of education at the gymnasium and at the demand of his father, Vasylkivsky began studies at the Kharkiv Veterinary School. This lasted until 1873, when Vasylkivsky left veterinary studies due to his parents inability to pay for tuition. For a while, he worked as a civil servant in Kharkiv.
In 1876, contrary to his father's wishes, Vasylkivsky left for the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts
. While there, Vasylkivsky was supervised by well known landscape painters Volodymyr Orlovsky
and Mykhailo Klodt. His education was supplemented with traveling exhibitions and trips back home. Upon graduation in 1885 he traveled to Europe and North Africa on a scholarship from the Academy, painting places he visited from Spain to Germany and Egypt.
In Paris, Vasylkivsky became fascinated with the Barbizon school
. By the time he returned to the Academy, Vasylkivsky brought with him an exhibition of almost 50 art works. Critics praised these paintings, calling them "miniature pearls". The paintings reflected the influence of the Barbizon School's panoramic depiction of space, the sky and the silvery atmosphere of "Pierre Corot". Vasylkivsky retained these characteristics in his Ukrainian landscapes.
After settling in Kharkiv
in 1888, he became active in Ukrainian artistic circles and headed the architectural and art society there. Vasylkivsky died at age 62 in Kharkiv
.
A typical Vasylkivsky theme is an armed horse-mounted Zaporozhian Cossack in the Ukrainian steppes or a group of cossacks on sentry duty, traveling or resting. To this group of works belong panoramic views with historical titles such as "Cossack Mountain".
In the middle of the painting "Cossack Picket
" (1888), three horses stand in the dawn light; to the right, near the fire, sit resting cossacks who are on watch duty in the steppes. The sky and the unbounded steppes, veiled in lily-blue fog, and wet grass and humid air, change colors gradually.
The end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw an upsurge of interest in Ukrainian culture and flourishing of Ukrainian painting. Painters such as Serhiy Vasylkivsky and Oleksandr Murashko
introduced new subjects, new approaches, new visions and new techniques to keep abreast with the latest developments in European painting of those times.
Vasylkivsky left behind almost 3,000 works of realist
and impressionist
art, sketches, drawings, a great number of which were lost during World War II. He was the first, after Taras Shevchenko
, to draw upon subject matter from Ukraine's past and completed a number of works on historical and ethnographic themes.
Vasylkivsky created three large panels for the Poltava
Zemstvo
(Provincial Land Administration) building which was designed by the Ukrainian architect Vasyl Krychevsky
: The Chumak Road to Romodan, Election of Pushkar, The Duel of Cossack Holota with a Tatar. As well he helped design the interior ornamentation in a 'Modern Ukrainian' folk style.
Together with Mykola Samokysh and ethnographer and archaeologist, Dmytro Yavornytsky
, Vasylkivsky worked on the album "From Ukrainian Antiquity" (1900).
Izium
Izyum , is a city situated on the Donets River in the Kharkiv Oblast of eastern Ukraine. Serving as the administrative center of the Iziumsky Raion , the city itself is also designated as a separate raion within the oblast, and is located approximately 75 miles southeast of the oblast capital,...
— October 7, 1917, Kharkiv
Kharkiv
Kharkiv or Kharkov is the second-largest city in Ukraine.The city was founded in 1654 and was a major centre of Ukrainian culture in the Russian Empire. Kharkiv became the first city in Ukraine where the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in December 1917 and Soviet government was...
) was one of the most prolific Ukrainian
Ukrainians
Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
s of the pre-revolutionary period and an expert on Ukrainian ornamentation and folk art.
Biography
Vasylkivsky grew up in an environment conducive to his development as an artist. He was born and spent his childhood in the picturesque surroundings of IziumIzium
Izyum , is a city situated on the Donets River in the Kharkiv Oblast of eastern Ukraine. Serving as the administrative center of the Iziumsky Raion , the city itself is also designated as a separate raion within the oblast, and is located approximately 75 miles southeast of the oblast capital,...
, a city in the historical region of Sloboda Ukraine
Sloboda Ukraine
Sloboda Ukraine was a historical region which developed and flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries on the southwestern frontier of the Tsardom of Russia....
, and today's Kharkiv Oblast
Kharkiv Oblast
Kharkiv Oblast is an oblast in eastern Ukraine. The oblast borders Russia to the north, Luhansk Oblast to the east, Donetsk Oblast to the south-east, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast to the south-west, Poltava Oblast to the west and Sumy Oblast to the north-west...
. The future painter had a chumak
Chumak
Chumak are a class of merchants and traders from the area comprising modern Ukraine.The term's origin is from the word chum , a special storage container for salt or fish. Some claim it to be a derivative from the Ukrainian word chymchykuvaty, meaning to walk about, touring...
grandfather whose roots reached cossack
Cossack
Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic people who originally were members of democratic, semi-military communities in what is today Ukraine and Southern Russia inhabiting sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper and Don basins and who played an important role in the...
ancestral lines. Vasylkivsky's father was a writer and taught his son the aesthetics of proper calligraphy
Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
. His mother, through her folk songs set the foundation which provided the inspiration for Vasylkivsky's art later in life.
When he was seven years old, his parents moved to Kharkiv
Kharkiv
Kharkiv or Kharkov is the second-largest city in Ukraine.The city was founded in 1654 and was a major centre of Ukrainian culture in the Russian Empire. Kharkiv became the first city in Ukraine where the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in December 1917 and Soviet government was...
, which at the time was a significant cultural center of Sloboda Ukraine. Vasylkivsky's first art lessons were given at the Kharkiv gymnasium
Gymnasium (school)
A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual...
by Dmytro Bezperchy, a student of Karl Briullov
Karl Briullov
Karl Pavlovich Bryullov , also transliterated Briullov or Briuloff and referred to by his friends as "The Great Karl", was a Russian painter...
. During the years of his study, Vasylkivsky was able to use the extensive book collection of his relative and poet, V. Alexandrov. Among these were the works by Ivan Kotlyarevsky
Ivan Kotlyarevsky
Ivan Petrovych Kotlyarevsky , was a Ukrainian writer, poet and playwright, regarded as the pioneer of modern Ukrainian literature. Kotliarevsky was a veteran of the Russo-Turkish War.- Biography :...
, Taras Shevchenko
Taras Shevchenko
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko -Life:Born into a serf family of Hryhoriy Ivanovych Shevchenko and Kateryna Yakymivna Shevchenko in the village of Moryntsi, of Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire Shevchenko was orphaned at the age of eleven...
, and Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...
, which made a strong impression on the young artist. After five years of education at the gymnasium and at the demand of his father, Vasylkivsky began studies at the Kharkiv Veterinary School. This lasted until 1873, when Vasylkivsky left veterinary studies due to his parents inability to pay for tuition. For a while, he worked as a civil servant in Kharkiv.
In 1876, contrary to his father's wishes, Vasylkivsky left for the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts
Imperial Academy of Arts
The Russian Academy of Arts, informally known as the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, completed 25 years later in 1789...
. While there, Vasylkivsky was supervised by well known landscape painters Volodymyr Orlovsky
Volodymyr Orlovsky
Volodymyr Orlovsky was a Russian-Ukrainian realist painter. Orlovsky is considered one of the founders of Ukrainian Realist landscape painting.- Life, art, and death:...
and Mykhailo Klodt. His education was supplemented with traveling exhibitions and trips back home. Upon graduation in 1885 he traveled to Europe and North Africa on a scholarship from the Academy, painting places he visited from Spain to Germany and Egypt.
In Paris, Vasylkivsky became fascinated with the Barbizon school
Barbizon school
The Barbizon school of painters were part of a movement towards realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870...
. By the time he returned to the Academy, Vasylkivsky brought with him an exhibition of almost 50 art works. Critics praised these paintings, calling them "miniature pearls". The paintings reflected the influence of the Barbizon School's panoramic depiction of space, the sky and the silvery atmosphere of "Pierre Corot". Vasylkivsky retained these characteristics in his Ukrainian landscapes.
After settling in Kharkiv
Kharkiv
Kharkiv or Kharkov is the second-largest city in Ukraine.The city was founded in 1654 and was a major centre of Ukrainian culture in the Russian Empire. Kharkiv became the first city in Ukraine where the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in December 1917 and Soviet government was...
in 1888, he became active in Ukrainian artistic circles and headed the architectural and art society there. Vasylkivsky died at age 62 in Kharkiv
Kharkiv
Kharkiv or Kharkov is the second-largest city in Ukraine.The city was founded in 1654 and was a major centre of Ukrainian culture in the Russian Empire. Kharkiv became the first city in Ukraine where the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in December 1917 and Soviet government was...
.
Art works
In the middle of the painting "Cossack Picket
Picket (military)
In military terminology, a picket refers to soldiers or troops placed on a line forward of a position to warn against an enemy advance. It can also refer to any unit performing a similar function...
" (1888), three horses stand in the dawn light; to the right, near the fire, sit resting cossacks who are on watch duty in the steppes. The sky and the unbounded steppes, veiled in lily-blue fog, and wet grass and humid air, change colors gradually.
Legacy
Oleksandr Murashko
Oleksandr Murashko was a Ukrainian painter.-External links:*...
introduced new subjects, new approaches, new visions and new techniques to keep abreast with the latest developments in European painting of those times.
Vasylkivsky left behind almost 3,000 works of realist
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
and impressionist
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
art, sketches, drawings, a great number of which were lost during World War II. He was the first, after Taras Shevchenko
Taras Shevchenko
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko -Life:Born into a serf family of Hryhoriy Ivanovych Shevchenko and Kateryna Yakymivna Shevchenko in the village of Moryntsi, of Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire Shevchenko was orphaned at the age of eleven...
, to draw upon subject matter from Ukraine's past and completed a number of works on historical and ethnographic themes.
Vasylkivsky created three large panels for the Poltava
Poltava
Poltava is a city in located on the Vorskla River in central Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Poltava Oblast , as well as the surrounding Poltava Raion of the oblast. Poltava's estimated population is 298,652 ....
Zemstvo
Zemstvo
Zemstvo was a form of local government that was instituted during the great liberal reforms performed in Imperial Russia by Alexander II of Russia. The idea of the zemstvo was elaborated by Nikolay Milyutin, and the first zemstvo laws were put into effect in 1864...
(Provincial Land Administration) building which was designed by the Ukrainian architect Vasyl Krychevsky
Vasyl Krychevsky
Vasyl Hryhorovych Krychevsky was a Ukrainian painter, architect, art scholar, graphic artist, and master of applied art and decorative art. He was the brother of Ukrainian painter Fedir Krychevsky.-Life:...
: The Chumak Road to Romodan, Election of Pushkar, The Duel of Cossack Holota with a Tatar. As well he helped design the interior ornamentation in a 'Modern Ukrainian' folk style.
Together with Mykola Samokysh and ethnographer and archaeologist, Dmytro Yavornytsky
Dmytro Yavornytsky
Dmytro Yavornytsky , was a noted Ukrainian historian, archeologist, ethnographer, folklorist, and lexicographer. He was one of the most prominent researchers of the Ukrainian Cossacks, especially the Zaporozhian Cossacks , and the author of their first general history...
, Vasylkivsky worked on the album "From Ukrainian Antiquity" (1900).