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Abram Efimovich Arkhipov (Russian: Абра́м Ефи́мович Архи́пов) (August 27 [O.S. August 15] 1862 – September 25, 1930) was a Russian realist artist, who was a member of the art collective The Wanderers as well as the Union of Russian Artists.
Born in the village of Yegorovo in the Ryazan Oblast Arkhipov (birth name Abram Pyrikov) left for the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1877, where he would fall under the tutelage of various Russian artists including Vasily Perov, Vasily Polenov and Vladimir Makovsky. In 1883, Archipov went to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts at Saint Petersburg, he would stay there two years, before returning to complete his studies in Moscow.
Arkhipov was accepted into the art collective, The Wanderers in 1889, and joined the Union of Russian Artists in 1903. Themes that occur within his artwork include the lives of Russian women, with some of his realist paintings depicting their grim daily realities. Arkhipov also painted several paintings of peasant women in rural Russia, depicting them in vibrant traditional dresses and national costumes. Like others in the Union of Russian Artists, Arkhipov also painted regularly en plein air, travelling and painting scenes from the North of Russia and the White Sea coast.
Arkhipov also taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture where he was originally a student, and from 1922 through 1924 taught at Vkhutemas. Arkhipov joined the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia in 1924, and in 1927 was awarded the title of People’s Artist of the USSR. Arkhipov died in Moscow in 1930.
Related Poem:
A Peasant
by R. S. Thomas
Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind—
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact, shock the refined,
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed, even in death’s confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.
