Vilhelms Purvītis was a landscape painter and respected educator. These varied activities made him one of Latvia's most distinguished 20th-century personalities.
Background
Purvītis was born in Zaube, Latvia, on March 3, 1872, in a family of a miller. He was the eldest child of Juris and Anna Purvītis. He moved in 1887 with his parents, two sisters and two brothers to Klastici in Belarus, where his father rented a windmill.
Education
Vilhems Purvītis attended a municipal school in Drissa (present-day Belarus) until 1888. Here his drawing skills were noticed for the first time. When his family returned to Vidzeme Purvītis worked in his father's mill in Smiltene parish for two years. At school, he met the drawing teacher Karl Schmid, who had been a student of the Imperial Academy of Arts (later known as Ilya Repin St. Petersburg State Academic Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture) in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Schmid saw the talent of the young Vilhelms and urged him to go to the same Academy. Vilhelms Purvītis did so in 1890 and never forgot the experience, which set his direction for the future. There he primarily studied under the guidance of Arkhip Kuindzhi, graduating with the Grand Gold Medal. While in academy he examined paintings of old Dutch masters and became a close fellow with two Latvian painters, Janis Rozentāls and Johan Valter.
In 1898 Purvītis made a study trip across Europe together with Janis Rozentāls and Johan Valter. His paintings were presented with great success in Berlin, Munich, Paris, and Lyon. In 1899 the artist came back to Riga. There he gave private lessons in painting. In the year 1902 Vilhelms Purvītis went to Spitzbergen in Norway to study the painting of snow, and after the Revolution of 1905, Purvītis moved to Tallinn to work as a drawing teacher in a local Realschule. He returned to Riga in 1909 and was appointed director of the City School of Art and this marked a significant turning point in art education in Latvia. In 1913 he seriously thought about the foundation of an institution of higher artistic education in Riga but World War I put a temporary end to this idea.
After World War I started in 1915, Riga city art school was evacuated to St. Petersburg where it was eventually closed in 1916. In 1917 Purvītis went to Norway to improve his health and there he held his first solo exhibition in Oslo. The following year he returned to German occupied Riga. Impressed by Purvītis international fame the Soviet Baltic government in 1919 appointed him to run the Riga City Museum of Art. It was the time when the fulfilment of Vilhelms Purvītis' long standing dream about a Latvian Art Academy reached culmination, as on August 20, 1919, the Cabinet of Ministers issued decrees on the founding of the academy and on the appointment of Purvītis as its first rector.
On 6 February 1921, Vilhelms Purvītis celebrated the 25th anniversary of the date on which he had participated in his first exhibition at the Riga City Museum of Art, 'The Salon of the Rejected'. It was held in St. Petersburg. The minister of education presented there Purvītis with a Culture Foundation prize of 25.000 roubles. It was the first time that a Latvian government had presented a cash prize to an artist.
Purvītis constantly experimented and became known as a master of snow scenes, moving from realism to impressionism. The artist's landscapes depicted local motives and Latvian nature, which were portrayed in the neo-romantic atmosphere. Over the course of his career, Vilhelms Purvītis created more than a thousand paintings and drawings, but many of them were never presented publicly because he preferred to collect them in his apartment.
Vilhelms Purvītis lost all of his belongings and a lot of his works when his house and studio was destroyed during the Battle of Jelgava in the summer of 1944. Purvītis was forced to evacuate with his family to Liepāja and from there to Danzig, however, the trip was too much of a strain and he didn't manage to survive.