lower-middle-class provincial family; early work as a copyist clerk
Imperial Academy of Arts (1857-63, St Petersburg)
1863 - organizes protest against the mythological themes required for admittance to the Imperial Academy; begins teaching at the Schools of Drawing run by the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts
1870s-80s –Pavel Tretyakov commissions portraits of literary and artistic figures including Lev Tolstoy (1873, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow); also paints peasant portraits
1888 – publication of V. Stasov, ed., Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoy: His Life, Correspondence and Art Critical Essays
Pavel Tretyakov
Self-Portrait, 1867 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)
Christ in the Wilderness, 1872 (Tretyakov Gallery)
Nekrasov at the Time of his Last Poems, 1877-78 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)
Kramskoy Painting a Portrait of His Daughter, 1884 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)
See also Ilya Repin’s 1882 portrait of Kramskoy (Tretyakov Gallery)
Andreev, A. “Ivan Kramskoy as a Theoretician of the Democratic Trend in Russian Art,” Vestnik Akademii Nauk, SSSR, vol. 12 (1987): 85-97
Steiner, Evgeny. “Pursuing Independence: Kramskoi and the Peredvizhniki vs. the Academy of Arts,” Russian Review vol. 70, no. 2 (April 2011), 252-71