The Voyage of the Minyans
Похід мінійців
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.
Related Works
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.
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.
Portrait of the Dying Father. Agony
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.
The Indestructible Sophia of Kyiv
Yurii Khymych
Saint Sophia Cathedral rendered in Khymych's mature manner of open colour and heavy black contour, the title borrowed from the ancient epithet of the Kyivan cathedral. Ukrposhta reproduced the painting on an 80-kopiyka stamp in 2005.