Der Imker

Kramskoi belonged to the group of Russian painters who in 1863 walked out of the Imperial Academy and set up on their own, carrying their exhibitions from city to city. They wanted art about ordinary Russian life rather than Greek gods, and this old beekeeper is exactly that. He sits on a worn log in his loose white shirt, barefoot, a scythe in his hand, hives behind him. Kramskoi gives him the steady, serious attention a portrait painter would usually reserve for a general or a bishop. There is no anecdote here, no picturesque hardship, just an aging peasant looked at closely. The picture travelled with the group's exhibition of 1874, where viewers of democratic sympathies received it as a portrait of the real Russia.