Romanticism

Romanticism—an ideological and artistic movement in European and American culture from the late 18th century to the first half of the 19th century—is characterized by the affirmation of the intrinsic value of the individual’s spiritual and creative life, the depiction of intense (often rebellious) passions and characters, and the portrayal of nature as inspiring and healing. It spread to various spheres of human activity. In the 18th century, anything strange, picturesque, and existing in books rather than in reality was called romantic. At the beginning of the 19th century, Romanticism became the name for a new movement, opposed to Classicism and the Enlightenment.

Artists of the Movement

Dmytro Levytskyi

1735–1822

A leading portraitist of the 18th century, born in Kyiv and trained by his father, the engraver-priest Hryhorii Levytsky. Famous for his Smolnyi Institute portrait series, he became one of the most celebrated portrait painters of his era.

Anton Losenko

1737–1773

Born in Hlukhiv in the Cossack Hetmanate and taken young to the St. Petersburg court choir, Losenko became a pioneer of neoclassical history painting, known for monumental canvases from antiquity and Kyivan Rus.

Volodymyr Borovykovskyi

1757–1825

Born in Myrhorod into a Cossack family of icon painters, Borovikovskyi worked in Ukraine into his thirties before moving to St. Petersburg, where he became the foremost portraitist of the Sentimentalist era.

Taras Shevchenko

1814–1861

Born a serf and freed in 1838, Shevchenko is regarded as the father of Ukrainian fine art: a Romantic-Realist painter and pioneering etcher (Academician of engraving, 1860), turning his art to Ukrainian life and social injustice.

Ivan Aivazovskyi

1817–1900

Armenian marine painter of Crimea, among the greatest seascape masters of the 19th century.

Kostiantyn Trutovskyi

1826–1893

Early master of Ukrainian genre painting devoted to the Ukrainian peasantry; influenced Pymonenko, Vasylkivskyi and Slastion.

Kornylo Ustyianovych

1839–1903

A Galician Ukrainian painter, iconographer and writer, Vienna Academy-trained, who became a leading figure of 19th-century Western Ukrainian historical painting drawing on Cossack themes and Carpathian folk life.

Arkhyp Kuindzhi

1842–1910

Greek-Ukrainian landscape painter famous for dramatic light effects (Moonlit Night on the Dnipro).

Teofil Kopystynskyi

1844–1916

A Galician Ukrainian painter, portraitist and church-art restorer trained in Cracow and Vienna, who spent his career in Lviv painting iconostases, portraits of Ukrainian historical figures and ethnographic scenes.

Serhii Vasylkivskyi

1854–1917

Prolific Kharkiv landscape, genre and history painter and authority on Ukrainian folk ornament; left ~3,000 works and donated ~1,500 to the Kharkiv Art Museum.

Opanas Slastion

1855–1933

Painter, graphic artist, ethnographer; first illustrator of Shevchenko's 'Haidamaky', documented Ukrainian kobzars, and a pioneer of Ukrainian Art Nouveau.

Vasyl Nepyipyvo

1916–2007

Vasyl Nepyipyvo was a Ukrainian landscape and still-life painter, People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR (1982), who worked entirely outside formal art education. A self-taught graduate of a Kharkiv art studio and a Second World War veteran, he built a career on lyrical panoramas of the Dnipro, Poltava region and Kyiv. Critics described his landscapes as epic, romantic and unusually rich in colour, rooted in the tradition of Ukrainian realist landscape painting.

Maksym Polyvianyi

b. 1999

Maksym Polyvianyi (b. 1999, Kharkiv Oblast) is a Ukrainian painter of near-monochrome, minimalist landscapes in acrylic. He paints the Ukrainian village at dusk and at night — a lit window, a stork's nest, fog in a hollow — reducing each scene to a few tonal values.