Russian Lacquered Box - After Konstantin Makovsky (1839-1915) "Children Running From the Storm." Depicts the original image pained in 1872 in a splendid reproduction on the top of the hinged cover. Ruddy red interior. Signed, dated, and titled indistinctly along bottom of image. Comes with bill of sale written in Russian cursive, indicating it was made in 1961 and sold in 1985 for $65 Soviet rubles. Fedoskino School. 1961.

Size: 10 x 7 1/4 x 2 1/2 In. 

#4 #6042 . 

Konstantin Yegorovich Makovsky was born in 1839 in Moscow, Russia. His father was the Russian art figure and amateur painter Egor Makovsky and his mother was a composer. Because of his parents’ professions Makovsky showed an early interest in both painting and music. He entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture at the age of 12, where he was influenced by his teachers Vasily Tropinin and Karl Bryullov. After graduating Makovsky went to France in hopes of becoming a composer, but after touring Europe in order to get acquainted with traditional folk and classical music, he ultimately chose painting instead. In 1858 Makovsky entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, where his paintings Curing of the Blind (1860) and Agents of the False Dmitry Kill the son of Boris Godunov (1862) garnered him attention all over Europe. In 1863 Makovsky and thirteen other students protested against the Academy’s decision to only allow artwork of Scandinavian mythology in the competition for the Large Gold Medal of Academia. They were all ejected from the academy without a diploma, and the incident later came to be known as the “Revolt of the Fourteen.” From this point onward he was associated with anti-academic trends in art, and a fervent supporter of self-taught and folk artists. Makovsky joined the Artel of Artists, a cooperative association founded by Ivan Kramskoi, whose members were Romantic artists that advocated for more realistic depictions of the everyday life of old Russia. His works The Widow (1865) and The Herringwoman (1867) were savaged by critics, but are considered prime examples of this revolutionary trend in Russian art. In 1870 he became a founding member of the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions and continued to work on paintings in the realism genre. He went on to travel North Africa and Serbia in the mid 1870s, which resulted in a significant stylistic change as he started putting greater emphasis on colors and shapes that would eventually directly influence the Russian Impressionists. At the World’s Fair of 1889 in Paris he received the Gold Medal for his paintings Death of Ivan the Terrible, The Judgement of Paris, and Demon and Tamara. By the end of the century, Makovsky was one of the most respected and highly-paid Russian artists. He died in 1915 when his car crashed into a tram on the streets of St. Petersburg.