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Yaroshenko, Nikolay (Aleksandrovich)
(b Poltava, 13 Dec 1846; d Kislovodsk, 7 July 1898). Russian painter of Ukrainian birth. The son of an officer, he had a full military career, retiring from the army with the rank of major–general in 1892. During his military training, Yaroshenko studied drawing and painting seriously, initially on his own, then from 1864 to 1867 at evening classes at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists under Ivan Kramskoy, and later as an occasional student at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts from 1867 to 1874. He became acquainted with examples of the new Russian realism of the 1860s and always remained in complete sympathy with these aesthetic ideas. From 1875 he began to participate actively in the exhibitions of the WANDERERS; he became a member from 1876 and after the departure of Kramskoy in the early 1880s he was effectively the leader. According to Il’ya Repin he was called the ‘conscience of the Wanderers’. The fundamental theme of Yaroshenko’s work was the life and character of figures active in the Russian liberal intelligentsia and the pro-revolutionary student body. His most successful works are devoted to this subject (e.g. The Convict, 1878; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal., and the Old and the Young, 1881; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.), and he also produced a large number of portraits of well-known figures in Russian arts, letters and sciences (e.g. the artists Ivan Kramskoy, 1876, and Nikolay Ge, 1890; both St Petersburg, Rus. Mus., and the poet and philosopher V. S. Solovyov, 1895; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.). The pathos inherent in the idea of social responsibility and the concern of the Russian intelligentsia for the fate of the country and people deeply impressed Yaroshenko, and is rendered with severity and restraint. He also produced pathetic renditions of subjects taken from the life of the people, for example The Fireman (1878), which shows the worker’s life and appearance disfigured by inhuman, penitential conditions, and Everywhere is Life (1888; both Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.), which demonstrates the dignity of man in extreme conditions of confinement. The latter was one of the most popular pictures among the Russian intelligentsia at the turn of the century. Yaroshenko lived primarily in St Petersburg, but he travelled widely in western Europe, the Near and Far East, the Urals, the Volga region, the Crimea and the Caucasus, producing a number of nature studies and several large paintings of the primarily mountainous landscape. From 1882 he paid annual visits to his dacha in Kislovodsk in the southern Caucasus (now the Yaroshenko A. Mus.).
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