Portrait of the Dying Father. Agony

Портрет умираючого батька. Агонія

Year1911

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnknown

LocationUnknown collection

Miasoiedov painted his father Grigoriy Myasoyedov from life as he lay dying at Pavlenky in 1911, an unflinching deathbed portrait with none of the consolation of nineteenth-century funerary painting. The picture marks the end of his father's Poltava household and the beginning of Miasoiedov's own decade there.

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About the Artist

Ivan Miasoiedov

1881–1953

Ivan Miasoiedov was a painter, draughtsman and engraver born in Kharkiv and raised on his family's estate near Poltava, where he led a bohemian artists' circle and painted Ukrainian landscapes alongside large symbolist compositions on antique myth. He was also a champion weightlifter, a wartime artist, a convicted counterfeiter and, from 1938, the designer of Liechtenstein's postage stamps under the name Eugen Zotow. His early Poltava-period work is held by the Poltava Art Museum, and the bulk of his later output by the Zotow–Miasoiedov Foundation in Vaduz.

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Movement

Realism

Realism is an artistic movement that sought to depict reality as accurately and objectively as possible, holding that the purpose of art is to reflect all aspects of existence, rather than merely its idealized representation. The term was introduced by the French literary critic Jules Champfleury in the 1850s to denote art that opposed Romanticism and Academicism. In the visual arts, the significance of Realism as a style is quite controversial, and its boundaries are undefined. In a narrower sense, realism is understood as positivism, a movement in the visual arts of the second half of the 19th century. One of the first realists was the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who opened his solo exhibition “The Pavilion of Realism” in Paris in 1855. Before him, artists of the Barbizon School—Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Jules Breton—worked in a realistic style. In the 1870s, realism split into two main movements: naturalism and impressionism. In contemporary painting, realism borders on the grotesque and anti-glamour.

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Related Works

1900

The Hollow Tree

An early plein-air study from the artist's Poltava years, built around a single split, hollowed trunk in open countryside. It belongs to the group of works that passed into the Poltava Art Museum directly from Miasoiedov's own estate, and shows him working from nature well before the mythological canvases of the following decade.

public-domain

1908

The Voyage of the Minyans

A monumental frieze-like composition of the Minyan heroes — the Argonauts — setting out for Colchis, rowing a long ship past a crowded shore. Painted for the Academy of Arts, it is the clearest example of Miasoiedov's turn from his father's social realism to antique myth handled in the manner of Central European symbolism.

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1910

Church Dome (Church in Hurzuf)

A steeply upward-looking view of a church dome painted during one of Miasoiedov's Crimean campaigns in Hurzuf, handled in broad, light-saturated brushwork. It belongs to the Crimean series that also includes Alupka and Tatar Cemetery in the Crimea.

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1840

Self-portrait

Taras Shevchenko