Vasylkivsky, Serhii

Vasylkivsky, Serhii [Васильківський, Сергій; Vasyl’kivs’kyj, Serhij], b 19 October 1854 in Izium, Kharkiv gubernia, d 7 October 1917 in Kharkiv. Painter and art scholar. He studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1876–85) and in France (1886–8). He also painted in Italy, Spain, northern Africa, and Britain. After settling in Kharkiv in 1888, he was active in Ukrainian artistic circles and headed the architectural and art society there. He produced over 3,000 realist and impressionist works, but many of them perished in museum fires during the Second World War. They include a few portraits; historical paintings, such as Zaporozhian Skirmish with Tatars (1892), Cossacks in the Steppe (1915), and Cossack Campaign (1917); genre paintings, such as Cossack and Girl (1894) and Market in Poltava (1902); and many landscapes, such as Cossack Meadow (1893), Dnipro Floodplains (1896), and Along the Donets (1901). In 1901–8 Vasylkivsky painted murals and ornamental wall panels for the Poltava Zemstvo Building, which perished in the Second World War; they included The Chumak Romodan Route, The Cossack Holota, and The Election of Colonel Martyn Pushkar. He copublished, with Mykola Samokysh, an album of Ukrainian folk ornamental motifs (1912), for which he painted over 100 designs, and an album on Ukrainian antiquity (1900, text by Dmytro Yavornytsky), for which he did 27 historical portraits. Albums of Vasylkivsky's works were published in 1970 and 1987, and books about him have been written by O. Nikolaiev (1927), Kostiantyn Slipko-Moskaltsiv (1930), M. Bezkhutry (1954, 1967), and I. Ohiievska (1980).

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