Cheptsov, Efim Mikhailovich

Born Dec. 28, 1874 (Jan. 9, 1875), in the village of Medvenka, now in Kursk Oblast; died Jan. 8, 1950, in Moscow. Soviet painter. Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1946).

Cheptsov began his career as an icon painter and illustrator. From 1905 to 1911 he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts with V. E. Savinskii and V. E. Makovskii. In 1922 he joined the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. He taught at the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1938 to 1940 and at the V. P. Potemkin City Pedagogical Institute in Moscow from 1945 to 1949.

Cheptsov’s prerevolutionary paintings depicted themes from both rural and urban life, for example, At the Country Fair (1910, Kursk Picture Gallery) and At the Doctor’s Office (1911, Art Museum, Krasnodar). Several of his works depict regions in Italy, especially the island of Capri. Cheptsov’s most important works include A Meeting of the Village Party Cell (1924) and The Retraining of Teachers (1925), both housed at the Tret’iakov Gallery. Alive with the spirit of the new phenomena of rural life and marked by a precise rendering of details from everyday life, the paintings played a vital role in the development of Soviet genre painting. Cheptsov’s later works include Weeding the Beets (1938), The Last News From the Front (1942), The Harvest (1944), and On the Day Off (1946), all at the Kursk Picture Gallery.