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Gagarin, Grigory (Grigor’yevich)
(b St Petersburg, 11 May 1810; d Châtellerault, 30 Jan 1893). Russian painter, draughtsman and writer. In 1823–4 he studied in Rome under the Russian painter Karl Bryullov, but he otherwise lacked any formal artistic training. From 1832 Gagarin was in the diplomatic corps, and from 1841–64 he was in military service, mainly in the Caucasus, where he took part in fighting. Gagarin developed his talents by practice in drawing and painting. He worked as an illustrator, and his scenes for Sollogub’s story Tarantas (St Petersburg, 1845) give a very realistic picture of Russian provincial life and expose the ugly truth behind the elegant façade of the Russian empire of the period. Several of Gagarin’s lithographs are well-known, including a series of portraits and also a title page for Pushkin’s poem Ruslan and Lyudmila in which Gagarin attempted to move away from making decorative vignettes to conveying the content of the literary work.
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