Fascinating stories from the life of the famous painter and amazing person Nikolai Ge

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Artists, as a rule, are subtle and soulful natures, in need of constant emotional inspiration. Nor was it an exception. Nikolay Ge- a philosopher in painting, all his life looking for an ideal in creativity and life. And next to him in life was walking, enduring all the hardships, ups and downs of his only beloved woman, whom he fell in love with in absentia, and who for many years was his constant model - both in the image of Mary Magdalene, and in the image of Peter I as well. About an amazing love story that lasted as much as 35 years and about many other fascinating facts from the life of the master further - in the review.

Private bussiness

Nikolai Nikolayevich Ge (1831 - 1894) was born in Voronezh in the family of a landowner. When Nikolai was three months old, his mother - half Polish, half Ukrainian - died of cholera. The boy spent his childhood in a Little Russian village, where his nanny, the serf of his father, was engaged in his upbringing. In 1841 he entered a gymnasium in Kiev, where he showed great ability to draw, but after graduation, at the insistence of his father, he entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Kiev University. However, after 2 years, the young man, realizing his true vocation, becomes a student at the Academy of Arts.

Gift for 25 rubles

And I must say - Nikolai's father was very domineering and despotic. The son of a French emigrated to Russia considered himself a freethinker and a Voltairean. However, he did not hesitate to whip his serfs with his own hands. Seek them all indiscriminately on "Saturdays" so that they "do not spoil." And one day, returning from the city, he brought the boy in a cart along with provisions and said casually to his son:

Fateful horse

Once a monk, an acquaintance of Nikolai's grandmother, painted in watercolor a gray horse with a raised tail and a Turkish saddle and presented it to the boy. - from the memoirs of Ge. It was after this that little Kolya became interested in drawing and began to draw horses with chalk on the floor himself. Horses were his favorite animals as a child.

An amazing love story that broke out in absentia

In the Kiev gymnasium, where Nikolai studied, he had a cheerful friend Parmen Zabello. After the end, their life paths parted, but not for long. Nikolai, having studied at the University of Kiev at the Faculty of Mathematics, a year later transferred to the same specialty at the University of St. Petersburg. And somehow at a student party I met my old friend, who was studying at the Academy of Arts as a sculptor. In less than a year, Ge will leave mathematics and become a student at the Academy at the Faculty of Painting. Together with Parmen, they will rent an apartment and will share even a dress coat, without which they were not allowed to enter the Hermitage. They had to wear it alternately.

Zabello tried with all his might to dress up, but Nikolai covered his clothes to the holes. Once Parmen jokingly said to Nicholas, who was walking around: “I’m just ashamed to go next to you! Go to the other side! And Ge obediently crossed the road.

For four years they lived under the same roof, becoming very close friends. Parmen often received letters from his sister Anna, who lived in the parental estate in the Chernihiv region. Once it happened that Nikolai accidentally read one of the girl's letters to his brother. Then the second, the third … The letters delighted the young man, they captivated him with their lofty structure and maturity of thoughts. And after a few subsequent letters, not even written to him, Ge was already decisively in love with the Anna he had never seen. Soon Ge himself entered into correspondence with an unfamiliar girl and discovered that in literature, in philosophy, in social thought, their tastes coincided. Ge decided: he would never marry anyone other than the "divine Anna Petrovna." And about this he decisively told her brother.

And the most amazing thing was that it turned out to be the pure truth. In 1856, 25-year-old Nikolai and 24-year-old Anna were married in the church of the Chernigov village of Monastyryshche. The young people immediately left for Rome, since not long before that Ge received the Great Gold Medal of the Academy for the painting "Saul at the Endor Enchantress", which gave him the right to retirement in Italy.

For more than 10 years the Ge couple lived in Italy, where their sons Pyotr and Nikolay were born - “white and black,” as the artist called them.

Life on earth and righteous works

Upon returning to Russia, the Ge family lived in St. Petersburg for four years. Nikolai Nikolayevich Ge became one of the organizers of the Association of Itinerants and took part in exhibitions. He became close to leading cultural figures, portrayed many of them.

However, very soon disappointment came both in himself and in art - he completely stopped writing. The artist, infected with the ideas of Leo Tolstoy, forever takes his family from the capital to the Ivanovsky farm in the Chernihiv region.

In the 1870s, Ge, having experienced a creative crisis, almost did not take up a brush for about three years. On the farm, he becomes a vegetarian, quits smoking, distributes part of his land to the peasants, works in the field and lays out stoves, striving to live in such a way that it benefits his neighbor.

His "simplification" was not easy for his wife Anna Petrovna: they sometimes quarreled. For her decisive and uncompromising character, Ge called her beloved Anna "the prosecutor." while working on paintings, he often called her to evaluate what had been done:. Anna Petrovna, with a trained eye unmistakably seeing the flaws, voiced her judgments in an even voice, and Ge almost always agreed with her.

In her memoirs, Sophia Tolstaya described Anna as follows:

Indeed, Nikolai Ge treated his wife with reverence and trepidation, and she was the artist's faithful companion throughout her married life of 35 years. Anna Petrovna Ge died in 1891, and the artist buried her in Ivanovsky, right in the garden of their estate. He will outlive his wife by only three years and will be buried next to her.

How Ge was afraid to pose for Ilya Repin

The portrait of Nikolai Ge, written by the master of Russian painting himself, Ilya Repin, is quite famous, who for a long time had the idea of getting a colorful old man in his model and painting a portrait from him. However, over the past few years, Ge has agreed to pose less and less often. Moreover, by that time there were already bad rumors about Repin:. Ilya Efimovich, on the contrary, was eager to paint a portrait of Ge, and for this purpose he specially came to him in Ivanovskoye.

But Repin did not even suspect that Nikolai Nikolaevich would succumb to superstition and begin to dodge quite seriously, hinting that he still wants to live. However, be that as it may - the portrait was painted, and Ge still lived for 14 years.

How Nikolai Ge divided the picture between the Emperor and Tretyakov

The exposition of the canvas "Peter I interrogates Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich in Peterhof", written in 1871, was attended by the Emperor Alexander II himself. The painting impressed him and he expressed a desire to purchase it. However, even before the start of the exhibition, this canvas had already been sold to Pavel Tretyakov, no one even dared to hint at the sovereign. The artist was asked to write an author's copy for Tretyakov, and give the original to Alexander II. But Nikolai Nikolaevich, without batting an eye, gave the original work to Tretyakov, and created a copy for the Tsar, which is now in the collection of the Russian Museum.

All my life in search of the ideal

- this is how the artist described his state of mind while working on the canvas "Peter I interrogates Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich".

The artist nevertheless found his ideal. He had to go through a difficult and thorny path in order to realize and see in Jesus Christ what no one had seen before. A series of religious paintings painted by Ge were completely misunderstood by his contemporaries. They were appreciated much later.

Often the artist's works were banned, sometimes they were simply removed from exhibitions. The same fate befell the painting by Nikolai Ge “ Catherine II at the tomb of Empress Elizabeth , which was not accepted by the public and only recently it was put on display at the Tretyakov Gallery.