Today’s Doodle honours Russian artist Arkhip Kuindzhi, who is 180 today. Kuinzhi invented an unique painting technique that portrayed the natural world like never before by combining developing findings in physics and chemistry with present Impressionism and Romanticism styles.
Arkhip Kuindzhi was born in Mariupol in January 1842, but spent his childhood in Taganrog. (Archippos, from (archos) “master” and (hippos) “horse”: “master of horses”; see. Colossians 4:17;) His Christian name is a Russian version of the Greek, o, (Archippos, from (archos) “master” and (hippos) “horse”: “master of horses”; cf. His surname was derived from his grandfather’s occupational nickname, quyumc, which means “goldsmith” in Crimean Tatar. His father, Ivan Khristoforovich Kuindzhi, was a Pontic Greek shoemaker, and he grew up in a destitute home (sometimes spelt Emendzhi).
Arkhip was six years old when his parents died, and he was forced to work at a church worksite, graze domestic animals, and work at the corn merchant’s shop to support himself. He got the basics of an education from a Greek family friend who was also a teacher, and then he went to the local school.
Kuindzhi went to Feodosia to study art under Ivan Aivazovsky when he was 13–14 years old, but he was only interested in mixing paints and instead studied with Adolf Fessler, Aivazovsky’s student. “Although Kuindzhi cannot be called a student of Aivazovsky, the latter had without doubt some influence on him in the first period of his activity; from whom he borrowed much in the manner of painting,” according to a 1903 encyclopaedia article. “The elemental sense of light and form associated with Aivazovsky’s sunsets, storms, and surging oceans permanently influenced the young Kuindzhi,” wrote English art historian John E.
Arkhip Kuindzhi worked as a photoshopper in Simeon Isakovich’s Taganrog photography studio for five years, from 1860 to 1865. He tried, but failed, to create his own photographic studio. Kuindzhi then flew from Taganrog to Saint Petersburg.
He primarily studied painting on his own and at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts (from 1868; a full member since 1893). He was a co-founder of the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions (Peredvizhniki), a group of Russian Empire realist artists who founded an artists’ cooperative in protest against academic limitations in 1870, which grew into the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions (Peredvizhniki).
Kuindzhi became recognised for painting enormous, empty views of contemporary Russia, such as the seascape painting “Red Sunset on the Dnieper, 1905-8,” which is still his most well-known work. Many of his paintings are now on display in his former living quarters in St. Petersburg, which have been renamed The Arkhip Kuindzhi Apartment Museum.
Here’s to Arkhip Kuindzhi, a painter who shed new light on modern art.
