Ivan Trush

Ivan Trush (Vysotsko, 1869 – Lviv, 1941) was one of the leading Ukrainian Impressionist painters. Beyond his work as a landscape and portrait painter, he was an art critic and an active patron of the arts in Galicia (Halychyna), a historical region of western Ukraine. He is remembered for helping to revive painting in Galicia. He was also the son-in-law of Mykhailo Drahomanov.

Trush studied at the Kraków Academy of Art from 1891 to 1897, under Jan Stanisławski and Leon Wyczółkowski, and continued his training with stays in Vienna (1894) and Munich (1897). From 1898 he lived and worked in Lviv, where he got to know the poet and writer Ivan Franko. His first public exhibition took place in 1899. That same year he became involved with the Shevchenko Scientific Society, for which he produced many works, mainly portraits. His travels took him to Italy, Egypt and Palestine.

Back home, he founded and organized the first professional art societies in Galicia: the Society for the Development of Rus' Art (1898) and the Society of Friends of Ukrainian Art (1905), which staged an early exhibition of Ukrainian artists that drew participants from Kyiv. His output was vast, with more than 6,000 works recorded. He painted many portraits of prominent Ukrainians, including Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stefanyk, Lesya Ukrainka, Mykhailo Drahomanov and the composer Mykola Lysenko. He also took a leading part, alongside ethnographers, poets and cultural figures, in establishing the Lviv National Museum.

A landscape by Trush, "Landscape from the outskirts of Naples", was presented to the National Museum in Kraków in the late 1930s. During the Second World War more than 120 paintings from that museum, including this one, disappeared without trace. The work reappeared among lots offered at a Warsaw auction in 2018, which suggests it probably never left Poland. A street in Ivano-Frankivsk bears his name, and in 2022 a street in Kyiv was renamed after him.