20.02.1869 – 23.05.1943

Painter, art critic and writer Pyotr Alexandrovich Nilus was born in the village Boucheny Podolsk province. In 1876, the family moved to Odessa, and the following year young Peter was given to the real school of St. Peter and Paul, but Nilus in the sixth grade left the school and entered the Odessa drawing school, where his teachers were G. Ladyzhensky and K. Kostandi.

Since 1889, he continued his studies at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts at Ilya Repin, who recommended the young artist to quickly begin exhibition activities and return to his hometown, where he powerfully declared himself a Partnership of South Russian artists.

Returning to Odessa, Nilus actively joined the local artistic life became one of the Central figures of the local artistic community, in1893 he became a member of the southern Russian artists. The painter has participated in almost all exhibitions from 1890 to 1919, and alalbaani of the authors of the Charter of the partnership in 1894.

In the 1890s P. A. Nilus wrote mainly genre paintings on socially significant topics. About this time he recalled: “He was a faithful wanderer for 13 years. Then the evolution from extreme realism to individualism began.” In the first decade of the XX century, after traveling abroad and exploring new contemporary art, the artist moved away from everyday genre and social problems, preferring landscape and impressionistic painting manner. The next period in the work of Nilus – “symbolic and romantic” or “retrospective”: the artist wrote gallant Cavaliers and ladies strolling in parks or meeting the dawn.

The main works of the painter were views of cities, landscapes of the French province, still lifes, which he created a kind of series. The first solo exhibitions of P. A. Nilus in Paris took place in 1925 in the prestigious galleries of J. Petit and J. Charpentier. Great success was the last lifetime exhibition of Nilus in the gallery ” Zak ” in 1934. By the mid-1930s, the artist began to give preference to psychological portrait.

During his life, the painter managed to write a lot of works that are stored in many museums. He died in occupied Paris.

In 1995, a significant part of the creative heritage of the artist’s Paris period 73 paintings, drawings, and personal belongings, photographs, letters, exhibition catalogs by the decision of the painter’s stepdaughter V. L. Golubovskaya, was transferred from Paris to Voronezh.