Nikolai Triik

Estonian painting turned modern in the space of a few years around 1910, and Nikolai Triik was one of the handful of men who turned it. Born in Tallinn in 1884, when Estonia was a province of the Russian Empire, he enrolled at the art academy in St Petersburg and was thrown out for joining a student strike during the revolution of 1905. He kept studying anyway, sitting in on classes run by the painter Nicholas Roerich.

His work drew on Symbolism and Expressionism, then new currents from the West, and he tied them to home ground. From 1911 he ran the art pages of the magazine put out by Noor-Eesti, or Young Estonia, a circle of writers and artists whose aim was to make Estonian culture modern and European, and he built a series of images out of Estonian folklore.

After spells in Copenhagen and Berlin he settled for good in 1913 and taught. In 1918, the year Estonia declared independence, he became the first Estonian to hold the title of Professor of Art. He stayed a portrait painter to the end, fixing the faces of his young country's writers and artists.