Yakhymovych, Fedir

Yakhymovych, Fedir (Teodor) [Яхимович, Федір (Теодор); Jaxymovyč], b 11 March 1800 in Belzets, near Zolochiv, Galicia, d 14 April 1889 in Vienna. Painter and theatrical scenery designer. A graduate of the Vienna Academy of Arts (1827), he worked in Vienna's theaters and as chief designer at the Royal Vienna Opera (1851–71). He painted portraits, landscapes, religious, historical, and genre paintings, miniatures on ivory, and icons for iconostases in the Greek Catholic churches in Vienna and Cracow and in a Greek monastery in Lebanon. In the last years of his life he worked as an artist at the Royal Gallery in Vienna and painted the interior of the university church (eg, the painting Banishment from Eden). His best-known canvases are The Heroism of David (1841), Mary Magdalene (1842), Interior of the Piarist Church in Vienna, The Baptism of Christ (1849, until 1944 in the Greek Catholic Episcopal Residence in Peremyshl), and Interior of Saint Stephen's Church in Vienna (1860).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]