イワン・クラムスコイ

In 1863, fourteen students at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, Ivan Kramskoi among them, refused to paint the graduation subject they had been assigned, a scene from Norse mythology, and walked out rather than compete for the Academy's gold medal on its terms. Kramskoi organized the group into an independent artel, and by 1870 that had grown into the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, who arranged their own traveling exhibitions across Russia instead of waiting for the Academy's approval.

His 1872 painting Christ in the Desert shows Christ alone on bare stony ground at dawn, wrapped in a dark cloak, deciding whether to accept earthly power during the temptation in the wilderness. Kramskoi later said he had painted his own dilemma into it, the choice between comfort and independence he had already made back in 1863. The Academy Council offered him a professorship for the painting anyway. He turned it down. Pavel Tretyakov, the Moscow merchant building what became the Tretyakov Gallery, bought the canvas that same year.

Kramskoi went on to paint portraits of Tolstoy and other leading figures of his generation before his death in 1887, at 49.