Works by Taras Shevchenko

Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian poet, was a serf until 1838, when a portrait painted as a lottery prize raised the price of his freedom and opened the Imperial Academy of Arts to him.

Early on he drew scenes from ancient history, such as the deaths of Lucretia and Socrates, in 1835–1837 while he was still a serf. At the Academy, under Karl Briullov, he won a silver medal in 1841 for The Gypsy Fortune Teller, a watercolour of a girl in a flowered headband holding out her palm to a woman with a child on her back. The oil Kateryna of 1842 shares its name with one of his poems about unprotected young women: barefoot, eyes lowered, she stands in a red skirt as a soldier on horseback rides off behind her.

On the first of three visits home, in 1843, he sketched Kyiv's historic sights; in 1844 he began an etched album to free his siblings, but only six plates were printed. In the 1846 Pochayiv Lavra from south, the white walls and green domes of the Lavra rise over thatched cottages. Arrested in 1847, he was sent to a garrison near the Urals as a private, barred by the tsar from writing or painting. A moonlit shore, a watercolour of 1853 from the exile years, is nearly all browns: a low moon, a lone crag, an animal running over the sand.

Two oval self-portraits are twenty years apart: in winter 1840/1841 he is young and beardless, and in 1861, the year he died, a lit face looks out under a fur hat, the heavy beard fading into the dark.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Museum Тaras Shevchenko, National Museum in Warsaw.