Blossoming Ukrainian Garden

Квітучий український сад

Year1949

MediumOil on cardboard

Dimensions30 × 42 cm (framed 42 × 53 cm)

LocationPrivate collection (sold at Goldens Auction House, Kyiv)

A small post-war panel of an orchard in full blossom, the kind of specific, dated Ukrainian village view Konovaliuk built his reputation on. Signed lower right and catalogued by Goldens as lot 4 of its Ukrainian collectible art exhibition.

Image: reproduction sourced from gs-art.com. This work is still in copyright — © the artist / rights holder. Shown for editorial and educational purposes; contact us for attribution or removal.

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About the Artist

Fedir Konovaliuk

1890–1984

Fedir Konovaliuk was a Kyiv painter and illustrator who began as an icon painter in the Pechersk Lavra workshop and became one of the most exact landscapists of the Ukrainian village. He worked for decades alongside Ivan Yizhakevych, together producing illustrations for the classics of Ukrainian literature. His small, densely coloured panels record identifiable places, seasons and even particular days rather than picturesque scenery.

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Movements

Realism

Realism is an artistic movement that sought to depict reality as accurately and objectively as possible, holding that the purpose of art is to reflect all aspects of existence, rather than merely its idealized representation. The term was introduced by the French literary critic Jules Champfleury in the 1850s to denote art that opposed Romanticism and Academicism. In the visual arts, the significance of Realism as a style is quite controversial, and its boundaries are undefined. In a narrower sense, realism is understood as positivism, a movement in the visual arts of the second half of the 19th century. One of the first realists was the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who opened his solo exhibition “The Pavilion of Realism” in Paris in 1855. Before him, artists of the Barbizon School—Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Jules Breton—worked in a realistic style. In the 1870s, realism split into two main movements: naturalism and impressionism. In contemporary painting, realism borders on the grotesque and anti-glamour.

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Also part of

Impressionism

Related Works

1947

Winter

A postcard-sized winter panel, an extreme example of the miniature scale on which Konovaliuk often worked, made in the same immediate post-war years as his blossoming orchards.

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1973

Kodra Village

A named-place village view of Kodra, in the Kyiv region, typical of Konovaliuk's insistence that a landscape record a specific settlement rather than a generic rural scene.

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1979

Autumn Landscape

A late upright autumn panel from Konovaliuk's ninth decade, still working the same small format and the same close attention to the colour of a particular season.

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1840

Self-portrait

Taras Shevchenko