Konstantin Bogaevsky

Konstantin Fedorovich Bogaevsky was born on January 12, 1872 in Feodosia and lived almost his whole life in this picturesque Crimean city on the Black Sea coast. He started painting at the age of six. He studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts with the remarkable landscape painter, peredvizhnik Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi.
Crimea is the main theme of Bogaevsky’s work. There he created his heroic and fantastic landscapes, transforming the local nature. Most of all he loved to paint ancient Crimea - legendary Cimmeria, about whom he knew from Homer’s “Odyssey.”
Bogaevsky’s paintings, including the “Crimean Landscape,” painted in 1924, are composition-fantasies. When he worked, a panorama of ancient Crimea stood before his “mind’s eye.” Ruins of the structures, centuries-old trees, broken tracks of the roads, paths of distant ages - all this became a reality for him. And the ancient Crimean land looked dark, sad and severe to him. He was particularly attracted by the severity and solemnity of Crimea’s eastern coast.
Many of Bogaevsky’s paintings have a space theme. The sun, the moon, the stars, the clouds occupy an important place in them. As contemporaries testify, he has paid great attention to astronomy. He had his own telescope and liked to watch the heavenly bodies at night. The artist’s wife wrote: “He loved astronomy, knew the starry sky as ‘his own land’.”
And on “Crimean Landscape” the sun shines brightly over the ancient Cimmerian land, and if you look carefully, maybe you can see even “two suns.” The picture is painted in watercolor on paper. Along with oil painting, the artist used extensively also watercolor, pencils and ink.
The activities of Konstantin Fedorovich Bogaevsky continued until the 1940s. The artist’s life tragically ended on February 17, 1943 in Feodosia by a bomb explosion. Konstantin Fedorovich transmitted in his art the great love to nature of the eastern coast of Crimea, which in the person of Bogaevsky found his true singer.
K. F. Bogaevsky at the Museum of Russian Art (Prof. A. Abrahamyan’s collection):
“ Crimean Landscape ” ,   1924