Makovskii, Konstantin

Born June 20 (July 2), 1839, in Moscow; died Sept. 17 (30), 1915, in St. Petersburg. Russian painter. Member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts (1898). Brother of V. E. Makovskii.

From 1851 to 1858, Makovskii studied under S. K. Zarianko at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. In 1858 he became a student at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. A participant in the “revolt of the fourteen,” Makovskii left the academy in 1863 and joined the Artists’ Artel. He was also a founding member of the peredvizhniki (the “wanderers”—a progressive art movement).

Makovskii was greatly influenced by salon art. In the late 1860’s and the early 1870’s he depicted the life of the common people in his paintings (Balagany on Admiralty Square, 1869, Russian Museum, Leningrad; Children Fleeing the Thunderstorm, 1872, Tret’iakov Gallery) and did a number of lifelike portraits (Portrait of O. A. Petrov, 1870, Tret’iakov Gallery).

Beginning in the mid-1870’s, Makovskii turned even more in the direction of academic painting (Return of the Holy Carpet From Mecca to Cairo, 1876, Russian Museum). In 1883 he broke with the peredvizhniki and painted mainly superficial portraits and genre-historical scenes (Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1881, Russian Museum; The Kissing Ritual, 1895, Russian Museum; Prince Repnin at the Feast of Ivan the Terrible, Irkutsk Oblast Museum of Art).