Ivan N Kramskoi (1837-1887)

Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi, was a Russian painter and art critic. He was an intellectual leader of the Russian democratic art movement in 1860-1880. Aspiring to expand the ideological expressiveness of his images, Kramskoi created art that existed on the cusp of portraiture and genre-painting.

The democratic orientation of Kramskoi’s art, his acute critical judgments about it, and his persistent quest for objective public criteria for the evaluation of art, exerted an essential influence on the development of democratic art and aesthetics in Russia, in the last third of the nineteenth century.