(b Constantinople [now Istanbul], 1762; d Dukstas, 1835). Lithuanian painter and teacher of Armenian descent. From 1772 he was educated at the Czartoryski court in Poland and studied in Warsaw under Jan Piotr de Norblin de la Gourdaine and Marcello Bacciarelli. In 1788–9 he studied in Germany, returning to work as a scene-painter in Michal Kazimierz Oginski’s theatre in Slonim. From 1798 to 1832 he taught in the painting department of Vilnius University, initially as assistant to Franciszek Smuglewicz, from 1807 as professor. In 1820 he organized the first art exhibition in Lithuania, of works by his students. His early work was influenced by French classicism, as in his portrait of Adam and Marie Mirsky with V. Shumskaya (1808; Warsaw, N. Mus.); later he was more interested in reproducing his immediate impressions of nature. He is considered the father of the Romantic trend in 19th-century Lithuanian art; he painted fewer formal portraits, in which a neutral background replaced the conventional landscape, and the individual characteristics of his sitters were brought out, as also in his Self-portrait in a Red Fez. Influenced by the ideals of the Biedermeier style, he produced genre paintings of craftsmen, tradesmen and peasants, using various techniques including chalk and sepia ink. Some of his drawings were reproduced as lithographs by his pupil Kazimieras Bachmatavicius (1803–37). In 1819 Rustemas set up his own lithographic workshop. His search for a truthful representation of life was matched by his striving for the realization of political ideals, specifically for Lithuania’s liberation from Russian domination. Like many other members of the intelligentsia, he was a member of the secret anti-government society known as the ‘masonic lodge’. His satirical playing cards, issued by Bogumilas Kislingas (1790–?1846), became widely known.

• Rustemas, Jonas
  • Ruseckas, Kanutas
  • patrons and collectors
    • Lithuania, §III: After c 1780