Between 1892 and 1897, Arkhyp Kuindzhi was a professor at the Imperial Academy in Saint Petersburg, and taught this week’s Ukrainian painter, Viktor Zarubin (1866–1928). Zarubin was born in Kharkiv, in the north-east of Ukraine, where he obtained a degree in physics and maths. No sooner had he graduated than he ran away with his fiancée to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian under Jules Lefebvre and Tony Robert-Fleury for three years.
In 1896 he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he became a student of Arkhyp Kuindzhi at the Imperial Academy; unfortunately, Kuindzhi was sacked the following year for supporting student protests. Zarubin continued his studies there, attaining the rank of academician in 1909.
Zarubin’s Crowd of Pilgrims from 1903 was exhibited at the World Fair in St Louis, MO, and was bought from a subsequent exhibition in Louisiana.
Cloud Shadows from about 1907 is an unusual elevated view of patches of fields lit in bright sunlight. Prominent among them is one containing a small flock of sheep and two shepherds.
From the dress of the women in his watercolour and ink drawing of this Cottage by the Shore (1907), he may have made this when in Brittany.
He most probably painted Voice of Silence (1907) above the Sviatohirsk Monastery, on the steep south-eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River in the Holy Mountains of eastern Ukraine. This painting was exhibited in the forty-fifth Wanderers Exhibition when it toured Moscow and other cities from December 1916 into the Spring of 1917. Yet, following the October Revolution in 1917, this monastery was plundered and desecrated, and its monks attacked and killed. It was eventually shut completely in 1922. Work on the monastery’s restoration didn’t start for nearly seventy years, when Ukraine gained independence in 1991.
Zarubin’s Dance on the Dnipro from 1910 shows folk dancing in a village on the bank of the River Dnipro, in Ukraine.
He painted these Poplars by a Riverside in about 1910.
These five women Returning from the Market in 1911 appear to be in Brittany. Their adjoining cottages have only tiny upstairs windows.
Village in Winter from 1912 could be anywhere in Ukraine or Russia.
After the October Revolution of 1917, Zarubin became an art activist, and helped design events for the new Bolshevik authorities.
He painted these two men in their small boats on A Woodland Lake in 1919.
Most of his remaining paintings here appear to have been made when Zarubin was in northern France, in the years following the First World War.
Scene from Normandy (1919) shows a fishing village on the Channel coast, its women busy while their menfolk were at sea fishing.
Fishermen’s Wives from the same year shows them greeting the returning fishing boats in blustery weather. They would then be responsible for landing the catch and preparing it to be transported to market.
Painted further west along the Channel coast of France, Zarubin’s Breton Women on Their Way to Mass from 1921 shows them ascending the short steep hill to the village church in the autumn.
He may have painted this undated study of light At Dusk elsewhere in Europe, judging by the construction of this waterside house with its tower.
Women by the Lake is another undated landscape, with these women washing clothes in the brightly lit foreground, against the dark clouds of a gathering storm.
My final painting is an undated sequel to his 1907 painting above, showing an elevated view of the Chapel of the Sviatohirsk Monastery and the Siverskyi Donets River below. This must have been painted before it was destroyed from 1917 onwards, when there were still around 600 monks living there.
The Monastery, its Cathedral and chapels were restored after the independence of Ukraine in 1991. Then in March 2022 it was damaged by a Russian air attack on the bridge below, when it was housing over five hundred refugees from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In May and June Russian shelling progressively destroyed much of the monastery, and most of it now lies in ruins, just one century since the Russians had last destroyed it.
Viktor Zarubin died in Saint Petersburg in 1928.
References
Wikipedia
Sviatohirsk Monastery on Wikipedia
Andrey Kurkov and others (2022) Treasures of Ukraine, A Nation’s Cultural Heritage, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 02603 8.
Konstantin Akinsha and others (2022) In the Eye of the Storm, Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 29715 5.