Fyodor Bronnikov

Fyodor Andreyevich Bronnikov (1827-1902) was a history and genre painter born in Russia who spent most of his life in Italy. His career shows how a artist trained in Saint Petersburg could become part of the Roman art world while keeping ties with the critical painters of his homeland.

The son of a decorative painter, he learned the basics of drawing from his father. After his father's death, when he was sixteen, he went to Saint Petersburg hoping to enter the Imperial Academy of Arts. He was not admitted at once and worked as an apprentice in a woodcutting workshop. The sculptor Pyotr Clodt noticed his talent and helped him attend classes at the Academy, where he became a regular student in 1850 and graduated in 1853 with a painting of the Mother of God, which earned him a stipend to study in Italy.

In 1854 he settled in Rome, where he set up a studio on Via Vittoria near the Villa Borghese. He painted landscapes, village scenes, genre pictures, historical works and portraits of the city's notable residents. Poor health kept him in the warmer climate after his stipend ran out. From 1863 to 1865 he visited Russia, where the Academy made him a professor for his depiction of Horace reading his satires to Maecenas. There he met the dissident artists who would later be known as the Peredvizhniki, which inspired a series of genre works on peasant life. He later joined the group and sent paintings from Italy to its exhibitions.

Among his best-known works is The Cursed Field (1878), an indictment of slavery. He died near Rome and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. He left more than three hundred paintings and drawings, along with funds to establish an art school in Shadrinsk. The school was not founded until the Soviet period, and his works became the basis of a museum.