Conference : 19th century Ukrainian and Russian painters discover the French Riviera

By Tatiana Mojenok-Ninin

There is evidence of Russian and Ukrainian artists on the French Riviera as early as the 1840s.
The famous painter of romantic seascapes Ivan Aivazovsky discovered Nice while traveling in the West with the writer Nikolai Gogol, having been awarded a gold medal by the Academy of Fine Arts. Many painters created landscapes inspired by the coastline and hinterland of Nice, such as Alexei Bogoliubov and Nikolai Yurasov. The latter, his friend the writer Anton Chekhov—who visited Nice several times between 1894 and 1900—and other artists, writers, and scientists frequented the villa of Kiev University professor Alexei Korotnev (1854-1915) in Villefranche-sur-Mer. His art collection, which now belongs to the Institut de la Mer in Villefranche, includes eight paintings by realist painters from the Peredvizhniki movement. The Institute also holds a portrait of Korotnev by Ukrainian painter Nikolai Pimonenko (1862-1912). Close to the naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage, he is also known as Kazimir Malevich’s teacher at the Kiev School of Drawing. But the 19th-century Russian artist whose name remains most closely associated with Nice is undoubtedly Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884).
She wrote most of her literary work there and began taking her first drawing lessons with François Bensa from Nice.