13.09.1830 – 03.09.1866

Konstantin Dmitrievich Flavitsky was born in 1830 in Moscow in the family of an official of the State Control. Soon the family moved to St. Petersburg, where in 1839 the father of the future artist died, leaving a widow and five children. Constantine and his elder brother were sent to the house of education of poor children. Ability to draw in Flavitsky showed up early, and it did not go unnoticed – he became a pensioner of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, and then entered the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, where he studied with Professor FA. Bruni.

Petersburg Academy of Arts Konstantin Flavitsky graduated in 1855 with a large gold medal awarded to him for the painting “The Children of Jacob sell their brother Joseph.” The medal granted the right to travel abroad, and six years the artist spent in Italy. Flavitsky’s original pictorial report was a large, dramatic expression “Christian Martyrs in the Coliseum”. The first major work of Flavitsky was not successful. Kramskoy rightly called it “crackling and theatrical, devoid of any independent attitude to reality.” Appeared to the light, two years later, the painting “Princess Tarakanov” brought the artist more fame.

The plot of Flavitsky’s picture “Princess Tarakanova” is based on a legend about the political adventurer of the 18th century, who declared herself to be the illegitimate daughter of Elizabeth Petrovna. She was arrested in May 1775 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where she died of consumption in December of the same year. The plot for the picture was a legend about the death of Princess Tarakanova during the flood of 1777, and thanks to Flavitsky this version was fixed in the people’s memory.

The painting “Princess Tarakanova” absorbed several trends in Russian painting: the romantic Briullov tradition, the principles of the academic school, new realistic trends. This combination of dissimilar features as well as possible determines the artist’s place in Russian art of the mid-19th century. Creativity Flavitsky – artistic compromise, an attempt to reconcile the opposites, find a moderate, satisfying all the option at the intersection of struggling directions.

A first-rate, talented painter did not realize his creative potential, he died of consumption at the age of 35, left in the memory of his descendants as a master of one painting.