Portrait of a Ukrainian Boy
Портрет хлопчика-українця
A study head of a village boy from the Chernihiv countryside around Ge's farmstead, painted with none of the ethnographic prettiness of the period. It is one of a small group of peasant portraits — with Old Peasant — that Ge made among his neighbours.
Related Works
Portrait of the Historian Mykola Kostomarov
Ge's portrait of Mykola Kostomarov, the Ukrainian historian and Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood member who had taught him at the First Kyiv Gymnasium. Critics have long counted it, with the Saltykov-Shchedrin portrait, among his most intellectually charged likenesses.
What Is Truth? Christ and Pilate
Painted over his earlier canvas Mercy, this is Ge's most notorious late work: a shadowed, exhausted Christ confronted by a Pilate standing in full light. Its refusal of any idealised Saviour outraged church and academy alike and the picture was withdrawn from exhibition.
Dawn. Khutir Ivanivskyi
High-resolution, unwatermarked alternative from the same Khutir Ivanivskyi landscape series, in case the watermarked 500 px 'Moonlit Night' is unusable.
Portrait of Nataliia Petrunkevych
One of Ge's last works, painted at Ivanivskyi: the daughter of his Chernihiv neighbours stands reading by an open window with the twilight garden behind her. The full-length format and the dissolving green half-light make it the most lyrical portrait of his Ukrainian years.