Yosyp (Iosif) Krachkovskyi was a landscape painter of Polish descent, born in Warsaw and trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, where he spent his career. He is best known for luminous Crimean landscapes and flowering-garden scenes, and for a group of Ukrainian subjects including 'Ukrainian Evening' (1889).
Yosyp Yevstafiiovych Krachkovskyi was born in Warsaw on 3 July 1854 into a burgher family of Polish origin. From 1871 he attended the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg as an auditor, studying chiefly under Baron Mikhail Klodt von Jurgensburg; his student landscapes 'The Mill' (1875) and the Smedova River view of 1876 drew immediate attention, and he took the small gold medal in 1878 and the large gold medal in 1879, graduating as a first-class artist. A state pension sent him abroad from 1880 to 1884 through Berlin, Düsseldorf, Munich, Milan, Madrid and Paris; on the strength of the work he brought back he was made an academician in 1884 and settled in St Petersburg, teaching drawing for the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts from 1888 and joining the Kuindzhi Society of Artists in 1904. His mature painting combines academic construction with realist observation and an increasingly bright, decorative palette, most famously in the Crimean series painted for the imperial residences at Livadia and Masandra and in his wisteria, azalea and almond-blossom pictures. A distinct group of his works takes Ukrainian subjects — 'Ukrainian Evening' (1889), 'Bakhcha', 'View near Lubny' — and canvases by him are held in the Kharkiv Art Museum alongside the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Sevastopol Art Museum. He died on 18 April 1914 at Cadenabbia on Lake Como in Italy; the poet Dmytro Klenovskyi was his son. Ukrainian encyclopedias list him because of his Ukrainian and Crimean subjects and museum holdings, but his birth, training, career and professional identity were Polish-Russian, not Ukrainian.
Art Movements
Works by Yosyp Krachkovskyi
At the Well
A village well with figures, painted in Krachkovskyi's academic-realist manner two years after he was made an academician. Wikimedia Commons files it under paintings of Ukraine by the artist.
Before the Thunderstorm. At the End of Summer
A large late-summer landscape of 1888 with a storm building over open country, and one of Krachkovskyi's most ambitious canvases by scale. Held by the Odesa Art Museum.
Ukrainian Evening
Krachkovskyi's best-known Ukrainian subject and one of his most widely reproduced pictures, showing a village at dusk under a warm, dying light. It belongs to the late-nineteenth-century vogue for the 'Ukrainian evening' motif popularised by Kuindzhi.
Twilight on the River
An 1889 river scene at dusk, from the same years as Krachkovskyi's Ukrainian harvest and evening subjects.
The Melon Field (Bakhcha)
A southern melon and watermelon plantation under a high summer sun, one of the two works most often cited as Krachkovskyi's Ukrainian subjects. The picture is dated by Wikimedia Commons only to the 1890s or 1900s.
Masandra
One of the Crimean landscapes Krachkovskyi painted around the imperial estates at Masandra and Livadia, subjects that made his reputation at court. A related view of the Masandra Palace is held by the Kroshytskyi Sevastopol Art Museum.
View near Lubny, Ukraine
An undated Poltava-region landscape recorded under this title in Sotheby's catalogues. It is the most specifically Ukrainian topographical subject in Krachkovskyi's surviving output.