Gavril Pavlovich Kondratenko
Russian, 1854-1924
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Kondratenko took part in many exhibitions as a member of the Kuindzhi Society, primarily as a landscape painter. He was also a member of the St. Petersburg Society of Artists and the Association of Russian Design Painters. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts between 1873 and 1882 under Mikhail Konstantinovich Klodt, a master of nineteenth-century Russian landscape painting. Klodt was born into an already famous family of Barons von Jürgensburg, an art dynasty that included his father, a noted engraver, an uncle who was a sculptor and his cousin a painter, both of whom were highly accomplished. His love of the Russian landscape and independent spirit led him to be one of the founders in 1868 of the famous Society of Travelling Exhibitions. In looking at his master’s work, it becomes more apparent that Kondratenko departed from the Realist school and towards the more lyrical and expressive style of Kuindzhi’s school.