Nikolai Yaroshenko

Nikolai Yaroshenko spent his days as an officer in a St Petersburg arms factory and his evenings painting the people the Russian art world preferred to overlook. A committed member of the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers who took realist pictures to provincial towns, he became known as the conscience of the group.

His Stoker of 1878 is often called the first serious portrait of an industrial worker in Russian painting, a soot-streaked man before a furnace door, looking straight out. In Life Is Everywhere from 1888 he painted convicts crowded at the barred window of a prison train, scattering crumbs to pigeons on the platform. The pictures were plain, unsentimental, and pointed enough that the authorities kept an eye on him.

Yaroshenko held his army rank to the end, rising to major general while he painted, and died in 1898 at his estate in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus, sketching to the last.