Porfirii Denisovich Martynovich

Born Feb. 25 (Mar. 8), 1856, in the village of Konstantinovka, present-day Krasnograd Raion, Kharkov Oblast; died Dec. 15, 1933, in Krasnograd. Ukrainian graphic artist and painter.

Martynovich studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art from 1873 to 1881 but did not graduate because of illness. He was counseled by I. N. Kramskoi. In Martynovich’s illustrations of Kotliarevskii’s Aeneid (black chalk, 1873-74, Kharkov Museum of Art), treated as genre scenes from the life of the Ukrainian countryside, in his portraits of peasants in black and white (Butrimikha and P. Tarasenko, both in 1875, and of F. Migal’, 1880, all in Museum of Ukrainian Art, Kiev), and in such pictures as Peasant Women Baking Bread (1877-80, Kharkov Historical Museum), penetrating social portrayals are combined with an ethnographic authenticity of the costumes and types of the Poltava region. After 1903, Martynovich did not work as an artist because of ill health.

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