Ivan Kramskoi

Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi (Russian: Иван Николаевич Крамской; 8 June [O.S. 27 May] 1837 – 5 April [O.S. 24 March] 1887) was a Russian Realist painter and art critic. One of the most prominent artisans during Tsar Alexander II's reign, he is remembered as co-founding member and public frontman of the Peredvizhniki movement.

Kramskoi came from an impoverished petit-bourgeois family. From 1857 to 1863 he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts; he reacted against academic art and was an initiator of the "Revolt of the Fourteen" which ended with the expulsion from the Academy of a group of its graduates, who organized the Artel of Artists ("Артель художников").

Influenced by the ideas of the Russian revolutionary democrats, Kramskoi asserted the high public duty of the artist, principles of realism, and the moral substance and nationality of art. He became one of the main founders and ideologists of the Company of Itinerant Art Exhibitions (or Peredvizhniki). In 1863–1868, he taught at the drawing school of a society for the promotion of applied arts.