Arkhip Kuindzhi: Google doodle celebrates 180th birthday of Russian landscape painter

Today Google doodle to celebrate the 180th birthday of Russian artist Arkhip Kuindzhi, a Russian landscape painter of Greek descent. His is also known as Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi.

By integrating emerging discoveries in physics and chemistry with the contemporary styles of Impressionism and Romanticism, Kuinzhi developed a new painting technique that captured the natural world like never before.

Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi was born on this day in 1842 in the coastal town of Mariupol, Ukraine, into a family of cobblers and goldsmiths. He grew up in a poor family. His father was a Pontic Greek shoemaker, Ivan Khristoforovich Kuindzhi. Arkhip was six years old when he lost his parents, so he was forced to make a living working at a church building site, grazing domestic animals, and working at the corn merchant's shop. He received the rudiments of an education from a Greek friend of the family who was a teacher and then went to the local school.

To support his family, Kuindzhi worked odd jobs growing up while fostering his early interest in drawing on his off time. Historians believe a bread merchant was the first to notice Kuindzhi’s talent as an artist and encouraged him to apprentice under Ivan Aivazovsky, a popular painter of maritime scenes.

Kuindzhi walked over 250 miles from his hometown to Aivazovsky’s studio in Feodosia, Ukraine. Despite Aivazovsky denying him an apprenticeship, Kuindzhi pursued an education at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, where he took classes on the physical effects of light with famed Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev. Due to its limited focus on European painting methods, the academy’s rigid traditions frustrated Kuindzhi. He left the school to paint natural landscapes of the Russian countryside and co-founded an organization for nomadic painters known as the “Society of Itinerant Artists” in 1870.

Kuindzhi became known for capturing massive, empty scenes of contemporary Russia, such as the seascape painting “Red Sunset on the Dnieper, 1905-8,” which remains his most famous work to date. Today, his former living quarters in St. Petersburg host many of his paintings and have been opened to the public as The Arkhip Kuindzhi Apartment Museum.

Here’s to a painter who shined a new light on contemporary art—Arkhip Kuindzhi!

Source: Google doodles, Wikipedia

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