Description of the picture:
Portrait of the artist N. N. Ge – Nikolay Aleksandrovich Yaroshenko. 1890. Oil on canvas. 92.5×73.5
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Yaroshenko (1848-1896) is one of the main participants in the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions. Having secured the glory of a portrait painter, Yaroshenko created an “era in the faces” – these are the types of student-student, student, student-stoker identified by time, and the distinguished circle of prominent personalities of the second half of the 10th century – L. N. Tolstoy, actress P. BUT . Strepetova, artist I. N. Kramskoy and many others.
In 1890, Yaroshenko performed a portrait of his comrade in association – painter Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge. The personality of this artist attracted contemporaries, many considered him a nonsense old man who had retired from his Ukrainian farm in the 1870s and lived according to strange religious convictions. Someone, on the contrary, found in him a spark of a living mind and a talent for oratory, the ability to read lectures on art topics in an exciting way. Creativity Ge also did not find a unity of opinion. Having devoted the last two decades of his life to the tormenting theme of the life and death of Christ, Ge performed countless paintings and graphic works with gospel stories. The theme of crucifixion that has taken possession of the artist will become central in his co-philosophical understanding of the Christian faith. Exhausted by the daily, hard work on the creation of the paintings “The Court of the Sanhedrin”, “Judas (Conscience)”, “Exit from the Last Supper” and others, Ge painfully experienced the rejection and misunderstanding of his work by the public, the prohibition of his paintings for display at exhibitions.
Yaroshenko portrayed the artist shortly before his death. The wise look of an old man, a God-seeker, an unrecognized genius as if asks the viewer: “What is the truth?”, Echoing the hero of his canvas, standing in the background."
