This week’s Ukrainian artist, Ivan Pokhitonov (1850–1923), spent much of his career outside the country of his birth, but still returned to paint its landscapes.
Pokhitonov was born in central Ukraine, on a large farm on the west bank of the River Dnipro, to the north of the city of Kherson. When he was eighteen he went to study at an agricultural academy in Moscow, from which he was expelled as a result of unfortunate events surrounding a prominent proto-Communist. He returned home to Ukraine, where he started studying at Odesa University in 1871. It was there that he received limited formal training in drawing and painting.
He exhibited some of his watercolours in Geneva, returned to Ukraine, then was soon off again, this time to Italy. From there he moved to Paris, where he worked in Eugène Carrière’s studio. In 1881, he was sent to paint scenes from the Russo-Turkish War for the Russian state. He was then accompanied in Bulgaria by a Nordic medical student whom he married in 1882. They settled in Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon.
Château du Huras at Gelos, near Pau is one of his earlier surviving paintings, dating from 1887, when he was living in France. Pau is a town in the south-west, midway between the city of Toulouse and the coast at Biarritz, and not far from Lourdes.
Snow Effect. Undergrowth at Pau from 1889 is a painterly oil sketch, with the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains in the distance. Like many of his works, this appears to have been painted en plein air on a wooden pochade panel, and is relatively small.
By the 1890s he had begun an affair with his sister-in-law Eugenia. They moved to a village close to Naples for eight months, then moved to Liège in Belgium. During the late 1890s he continued to travel in Europe, also returning to Ukraine.
Winter Twilight in Ukraine from about 1895 is an evocative oil sketch of the late afternoon on the edge of a village.
The Artist Painting on the Beach at La Panne shows Pokhitonov painting on the beach of this Belgian resort on the North Sea coast in 1895.
In 1901, Pokhitonov acquired an estate near Minsk, in western Russia, where he appears to have grown his own vegetables.
He painted In the Kitchen Garden there in April 1904, with the winter’s snow still melting from the fields behind his smallholding.
Fishing house in the Dunes, painted by Pokhitonov in August 1904, is probably one of his first paintings following his return to Belgium that year. He then settled down in the village of Jupille-sur-Meuse, close to the city of Liège.
He painted The Pond at Jupille at some time between 1907-13, apparently in the late autumn when most of the trees had lost their leaves.
The Walloon Village of Jupille from 1912 is a surprisingly realist view of the village with the fruit trees in blossom.
During the First World War, Pokhitonov returned to Russia, where he lived in Saint Petersburg, but was one of the many who fled at the beginning of the Revolution. He next stayed just to the east of Crimea, before returning to Belgium.
I also have three of his paintings for which I have no dates.
Khoutor, Evening, Summer, Ukraine shows a tiny hamlet, known as a khoutor, on a summer’s evening.
Toiling in the Field shows a man cutting long grass with a scythe, somewhere in Ukraine.
Pond under a Rainy Sky is a quick oil sketch made in early autumn, perhaps.
Pokhitonov died in Brussels just before Christmas 1923.
References
Andrey Kurkov and others (2022) Treasures of Ukraine, A Nation’s Cultural Heritage, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 02603 8.
Konstantin Akinsha and others (2022) In the Eye of the Storm, Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 29715 5.
The Eclectic Light Company 