Ilya Mashkov was born in the summer of 1881, in the Cossack village Mikhailovskaya, located on a tributary of the Don, Khopra.
Mikhailovskaya was one of the oldest Cossack villages on the river. It was founded in the 16th century on the low right bank, and at the end of the 17th century, it was moved to the high right bank. The village was rich, as evidenced by two stone churches on its territory — Bogoyavlenskaya and Sretenskaya. In the middle of the 19th century, 59 hamlets (a single-homestead settlement) were included in the yurt (association) of the village.
Mashkov was the eldest of nine children in the family. In 1889–1892, he studied at parochial schools in the village Mikhailovskaya and in the hamlet Sychev. In 1892–1899, his parents sent him ‘to the people’, that is, to work. At first, he worked as a grocer assistant in the village Filonovskaya, and then worked for the merchant Mikhail Yuryev in the city Borisoglebsk. There, Mashkov began to draw shop signs and learn drawing from the teacher of the Borisoglebsk gymnasium Nikolay Yevseyev.
In 1900, with practically no art training, Mashkov managed to enter the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where the famous painters Konstantin Korovin, Valentin Serov, Paolo Troubetzkoy taught classes. The future famous artists Aristarkh Lentulov and Martiros Saryan studied together with Mashkov.
Mashkov attended Konstantin Gorsky and Alexei Korin’s head class and the landscape class of Apollinarius Vasnetsov at the school.
In the painting “Evening Landscape”, displayed at the exhibition, Mashkov depicted a view of a Cossack hamlet, well known to him from childhood. The artist painted the canvas en plein air when he went on vacation after the end of his first academic year. This is one of the few works from that period that has survived to this day. Unlike the works of “Jack of Diamonds” period, Mashkov’s early works are realistic. So, in the ‘Evening Landscape’ the artist quite reliably captured the hamlet.
The canvas was painted in one go, in free, moving, open strokes. The restrained color scheme of the study is based on a combination of ocher, light green, and gray tones. At the same time, here Mashkov already strove to increase the decorativeness of painting, revealing materiality, which later became a striking feature of his style.
In the same year, Mashkov created his first self-portrait, which is also housed in the museum’s collection.
Mashkov painted the landscape near one of the hamlets that were part of the village Mikhailovskaya association. Like most of the artist’s works of the first half of the 1900s, the canvas is signed ‘Moshkov’ (using the letter ‘o’). However, his parents’s surname was always written with an “a”. Researchers explain this fact by Mashkov’s attempts to sign ‘like a city dweller’, trying to distance himself from his village origin.
‘Evening Landscape’ was kept for a long time in the Moscow workshop of Mashkov. The heirs of the artist’s widow, Maria Mashkova, donated it to the museum in 1985.
Mikhailovskaya was one of the oldest Cossack villages on the river. It was founded in the 16th century on the low right bank, and at the end of the 17th century, it was moved to the high right bank. The village was rich, as evidenced by two stone churches on its territory — Bogoyavlenskaya and Sretenskaya. In the middle of the 19th century, 59 hamlets (a single-homestead settlement) were included in the yurt (association) of the village.
Mashkov was the eldest of nine children in the family. In 1889–1892, he studied at parochial schools in the village Mikhailovskaya and in the hamlet Sychev. In 1892–1899, his parents sent him ‘to the people’, that is, to work. At first, he worked as a grocer assistant in the village Filonovskaya, and then worked for the merchant Mikhail Yuryev in the city Borisoglebsk. There, Mashkov began to draw shop signs and learn drawing from the teacher of the Borisoglebsk gymnasium Nikolay Yevseyev.
In 1900, with practically no art training, Mashkov managed to enter the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where the famous painters Konstantin Korovin, Valentin Serov, Paolo Troubetzkoy taught classes. The future famous artists Aristarkh Lentulov and Martiros Saryan studied together with Mashkov.
Mashkov attended Konstantin Gorsky and Alexei Korin’s head class and the landscape class of Apollinarius Vasnetsov at the school.
In the painting “Evening Landscape”, displayed at the exhibition, Mashkov depicted a view of a Cossack hamlet, well known to him from childhood. The artist painted the canvas en plein air when he went on vacation after the end of his first academic year. This is one of the few works from that period that has survived to this day. Unlike the works of “Jack of Diamonds” period, Mashkov’s early works are realistic. So, in the ‘Evening Landscape’ the artist quite reliably captured the hamlet.
The canvas was painted in one go, in free, moving, open strokes. The restrained color scheme of the study is based on a combination of ocher, light green, and gray tones. At the same time, here Mashkov already strove to increase the decorativeness of painting, revealing materiality, which later became a striking feature of his style.
In the same year, Mashkov created his first self-portrait, which is also housed in the museum’s collection.
Mashkov painted the landscape near one of the hamlets that were part of the village Mikhailovskaya association. Like most of the artist’s works of the first half of the 1900s, the canvas is signed ‘Moshkov’ (using the letter ‘o’). However, his parents’s surname was always written with an “a”. Researchers explain this fact by Mashkov’s attempts to sign ‘like a city dweller’, trying to distance himself from his village origin.
‘Evening Landscape’ was kept for a long time in the Moscow workshop of Mashkov. The heirs of the artist’s widow, Maria Mashkova, donated it to the museum in 1985.
