Martynovych, Porfyrii

Martynovych, Porfyrii [Мартинович, Порфирій; Martynovyč, Porfyrij], b 7 March 1856 in Kostiantynivka, Kostiantynohrad county, Poltava gubernia, d 15 December 1933 in Krasnohrad, Kharkiv oblast. Painter and graphic artist. He studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1873–81) and spent his summer vacations in the Poltava region collecting ethnographic materials and painting or drawing village scenes and portraits of peasants, landlords, stewards, and precentors. From 1881 he lived in Kostiantynohrad (now Krasnohrad) and traveled throughout the Poltava region with Opanas Slastion, drawing and painting landscapes and portraits. He and Vasyl Horlenko compiled a register of historical monuments in the region (1888). Martynovych also drew historical and literary figures (eg, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Ivan Mazepa, Hryhorii Skovoroda, and Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko) and pictures inspired by Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda (Aeneid, 1903), Taras Shevchenko’s poems ‘Kateryna’ and ‘Haidamaky,’ folk songs, and Cossack dumas. His best-known genre paintings are Old Women Baking Bread (1877–80) and At the Volost Inspector’s Office (1879). His ethnographic notes were published in Kievskaia starina in 1904. O. Slastion wrote recollections of Martynovych (1919, 1931), and Pavlo Zholtovsky (1930) and Stefan Taranushchenko (1958) wrote books about him.

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