Murashko, Mykola I.

Murashko, Mykola I. [Мурашко Микола; Muraško], b 20 May 1844 in Hlukhiv, Chernihiv gubernia, d 22 September 1909 in Bucha, near Kyiv. Painter, graphic artist, and pedagogue. After graduating from the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1868) he worked in Kyiv as a secondary-school art teacher and in 1875 founded the influential Kyiv Drawing School, which he ran until 1901. As an art critic he defended the realist tradition of the Peredvizhniki and rejected modernism. His paintings and drawings consist of landscapes (eg, Autumn, Above the Dnieper, View of the Dnieper) and portraits (eg, of Mykola Ge). He did a series of lithograph portraits, including ones of Taras Shevchenko (1867), Ilia Repin, and Petro Mohyla and a self-portrait (1868), and illustrated a Ukrainian edition of Hans Christian Andersen's tales (1873) and other books. At the end of his life he published his memoirs (3 vols, 1907–9; Ukrainian trans 1964). Yurii Turchenko's book about him was published in Kyiv in 1956.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]