Background
Yefim Yefimovich Volkov was born on April 4, 1844, Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire (currently Russian Federation) to a family of a nurse practitioner.
Universitetskaya quay, 17, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, 199034
Imperial Academy of Fine Arts
Yefim Yefimovich Volkov was born on April 4, 1844, Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire (currently Russian Federation) to a family of a nurse practitioner.
Yefim Volkov received his general education at the private boarding school and Vvedenskaya Secondary school in Saint Petersburg.
As to the artistic training, Volkov began it only at the age of twenty-two when he entered the art school of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. He learned the four-year curriculum in one year and became an irregular student of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts or Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts.
Besides the classes, Volkov developed his artistic skills by painting landscapes in real nature.
In 1870, he left the institution with the title of Free Artist for his canvas ‘View of Saint Petersburg and Vicinity’
Yefim Volkov started his professional career from the post of a clerk at the Ministry of Justice. He served until the rank of gubernial secretary and was obliged to retire.
Volkov’s artistic debut came with the participation at the exhibition of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts of 1872 where the artist presented one of his first canvases titled ‘Bog in Autumn’. The artwork impressed both the public and the critics so much that it was sent to the Universal Exhibition in London where it received good reviews as well. At the exhibitions of the Society in 1875 and 1877, Volkov had the same success.
Since the 1878, the artist’s career had been associated with the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions or shortly Peredvizhniki. He regularly demonstrated his artworks at the exhibitions organized by the Society and was rated as one of the best landscape painters of the Russian north nature. The reproductions of Volkov’s paintings accompanied by the descriptions or critical reviews were featured in various well-known Russian art periodicals. The period till 1890 became a peak of his career.
In the summer of 1879, Yefim Volkov along with his friends and colleagues Ivan Shishkin and Andrey Schilder travelled around the seaboard of the Black Sea in search of the subjects for their canvases. At the end of the next decade, Volkov received an invitation from Grand Dukes Sergei Alexandrovich and Pavel Alexandrovich Romanov to accompany them as an illustrator in their trip to the Greece, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine. The landscapes which Yefim Yefimovich produced during the journey were presented at the XVII exhibition of Peredvizhniki in 1889.
The next important show by the society in which the artist participated was held on January 15, 1902 in Saint Petersburg. It was the exhibition dedicated to the couple of artists – Yefim Volkov and Vladimir Makovsky. Yefim Yefimovich exhibited the artworks he had done during the period of 1875-1901.
The tragic events of the Bloody Sunday in 1905 brought the changes not only in the political sphere, but in the culture too. Modern and impressionism became more and more popular, and the art of Peredvizhniki, including the canvases by Yefim Volkov, lost their popularity.
However, the artist remained devoted to his landscapes till the end of his days.
Yefim Volkov was also known as a book illustrator. So, he produced the series of pictures for Mikhail Lermontov’s poem ‘Motherland’.
Cell
Creek in the Woods
Forest Landscape with a Watermill
Ukrainian Landscape
Fire
Farm
Warm Evening
In the Forest after Spring
Summer Landscape with a Fisherman
October
In Late winter
The Beach
Seascape
Near the Monastery
Cobweb Morning
Artists in the Open Air
Winter Landscape
Grazing
Sunset over the Lake
The Party in the Summer Garden
Noon in the Woods
Landscape with the Village Children
Rural Landscape
The Sea
First Snow
River in Ukraine
Landscape with an Abandoned House
Moonlit Night in the Wood
Quiet River
During Haying
Marsh in Autumn
Field of Daisies
Autumn
Landscape with a Pond
Yefim Volkov shared democratic views as many members of the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions. He reacted sharply on every political event.
According to the contemporaries, Yefim Volkov was “a poet of the Russian autumn and Russian fogs.”
Yefim Volkov was married and had a daughter. She died in 1884.