Sergei Zarianko

Born Sept. 24 (Oct. 6), 1818, in Liady, present-day Dubrovno Raion, Vitebsk Oblast; died Dec. 20, 1870 (Jan. 1, 1871), in Moscow. Russian painter.

Zarianko studied under A. G. Venetsianov in the mid-1830’s. He was also a student at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1834. He became a member of the academy in 1843 and a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in 1856. The precision of line representative of the Venetsianov school, as seen in Zarianko’s interior scenes and in the portraits of O. A. Petrov (1849) and F. P. Tolstoi (1850) in the Russian Museum in Leningrad gradually gave way to illusionistic naturalism. This new tendency is evident in the portraits of N. V. Sokurova (1854, Russian Museum) and P. Ponomarev (1855, Tret’iakov Gallery). V. G. Perov and V. E. Makovskii were among Zarianko’s pupils.