Mykola Pymonenko

Mykola Pymonenko painted the Ukrainian village from the inside. Born in 1862 in Priorka, then a settlement on the edge of Kyiv, he trained at the Kyiv Drawing School and briefly at the Saint Petersburg Academy before coming home to teach and to paint the life he knew — weddings, market days, girls telling fortunes, flower sellers on a Kyiv street.

He worked in the manner of the Peredvizhniki, the 'Wanderers', a group of Russian-Empire realists who took travelling exhibitions to provincial cities and painted ordinary people rather than gods and emperors. Pymonenko turned out more than 700 canvases, many reprinted as postcards, and in 1909 his painting 'Hopak', a whirling folk dance, won a gold medal at the Paris Salon and entered the Louvre. Among the students he taught at the Kyiv schools was the young Kazimir Malevich, decades before Malevich abandoned scenes like these for pure squares of colour.