DIGITAL ARCHIVE OF WORKS OF MYKOLA OLEKSANDROVYCH YAROSHENKO

Mykola Oleksandrovych Yaroshenko

Mykola Oleksandrovych Yaroshenko (December 1 (13) 1846, Poltava – June 25 (July 7) 1898, Kislovodsk) – an outstanding Itinerant artist, a member of the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions (since 1876), a member of the board (since 1876) and chairman of the Society since 1987).
He is a military engineer by profession. After graduating from the Mikhailovsky Artillery Academy, he served for more than 20 years at a cartridge factory in St. Petersburg. He retired as a major general (1892).
He mastered the art from an early age. He took private lessons, attended evening classes at the Drawing School of The Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. In 1868-1874, he was a free student of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. He considered I.K. Zaitsev (1805-1890), A.M. Volkov (1829-1873), I.M. Kramskoi (1837-1887) as his teachers.
He is known primarily as a painter, a master of acutely social genre paintings and psychological portraits. He worked a lot on creating landscapes, still lifes. He also has several interesting graphic works. The most famous paintings – “The Stoker,” “The Student,” “The Prisoner,” “The Girl student,” “Life Is Everywhere,” a portrait of P.A. Strepetova, portrait of M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, portrait of V.G. Korolenko, “In the mountains of the Caucasus.”
He is the author of a gallery of portraits of great contemporaries, friends of the artist: G.I. Uspensky, D.I. Mendeleev, O.M. Pleshcheyev, V.S. Solovyov, О.Y. Gerd, M.M. Kovalevsky, M.M. Ge, I.M. Kramskoi, I.P. Pavlov, О.А. Auerbah, L.M. Tolstoy, V.M. Maximov, М.М. Obruchev, M.K. Mikhaylovsky, K.D. Kavelin.
He lived in Poltava, St. Petersburg, and Kislovodsk. His wife, M.P. Yaroshenko (Navrotina), played a significant role in his life. In 1885 she bought an estate in Kislovodsk, where the family spent a lot of time, and from 1892 lived almost permanently. After her husband’s death, Maria Pavlivna was actively involved in popularizing his work, organizing a posthumous exhibition in St. Petersburg (1898) and transferring the art collection to his homeland, and opening a museum in Poltava named after M.O. Yaroshenko.
Mykola Oleksandrovych Yaroshenko was buried in Kislovodsk, next to St. Nicholas Cathedral. A monument has been erected on the grave, the bronze bust made by the famous countryman M.O. Yaroshenko – sculptor L.V. Posen. In 1962, in the Kislovodsk estate of the artist, the Memorial Museum-Estate of M.O. Yaroshenko was opened.
M.O. Yaroshenko enjoyed deep and well-deserved respect among many friends, colleagues, and like-minded people. “In the colorful bustle of life, the fate rarely confronts us with such integral, perfect and at the same time … multifaceted natures as Yaroshenko was. It is unlikely that there will be any significant area of life or thought in which he would not be more or less interested. And this rare greed among artists for the work of consciousness did not interfere with the freedom of his artistic creativity, in which there is inevitably much of the unconscious. He was a thoughtful artist in the full sense. I emphasize both the noun and the adjective because it would be unfair to emphasize one of them”, wrote M.K. Mikhaylovsky in an article dedicated to the artist’s memory.