Fyodor Buchholz

Biography

In 1885 Fyodor Buchholz, then a student at the Academy of Arts, submitted a programme picture, “Daedalus and Icarus”, to the Academy’s council. For it he received a minor gold medal and the title of Class Artist, Second Degree. By then he had seven years of study and five silver medals behind him, and one more year before graduation.

He was born on 9 June 1857 (21 June, New Style) in Włocławek, then in the Warsaw Governorate, and was christened Teodor Alexander Ferdinand. His father, Teodor Gustav Buchholz, owned the local printing house; his mother was Eleonora, née Fothke. He finished the realschule, a secondary school with a modern curriculum, in his home town and in 1878 entered the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. He studied under Pavel Chistyakov and Valery Jacobi; the literature also places him in the circle of Ilya Repin, although I found no direct indication in the sources that he was Repin’s pupil.

The silver medals came one after another. In 1880 he received three minor medals, among them one for the sketch “Ivan III Overthrows the Khan’s Yoke”, which survives in the Museum of the Academy of Arts. In 1884 he was awarded two major silver medals for a drawing and a study. He graduated from the Academy in 1886.

He had taken up graphic work while still a student, drawing for the magazines Niva, Sever (“North”) and Rodina (“Homeland”). From 1891 he belonged to the St. Petersburg Association of Russian Illustrators. From 1888 his work appeared in exhibitions of the Academy of Arts, the Society of Russian Watercolourists and the St. Petersburg Society of Artists, and in 1891–1892 he showed pieces at the 19th exhibition of the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), the realist painters who organised travelling shows. He painted mainly scenes of everyday life, but there were also portraits, landscapes and pictures on social themes. Among his known works are “The Grand Canal, Venice” (1898, Rostov Regional Museum of Fine Arts), “Unemployment” (1906, National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus in Minsk) and “Villa Salvo, Lugano” (1913, Russian Museum). The watercolour “Ilya Repin among Friends” (1900) is also in the Russian Museum. Toward the end of the nineteenth century traces of the Secession, the central European variant of Art Nouveau, became noticeable in his manner. There is also a mention of an exhibition at the Zachęta in Warsaw; I know no details.

In 1893 he began teaching at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and gave classes there until 1919. That makes twenty-six years.

In 1909 Buchholz was among the founders of the Kuindzhi Society.

After 1917 he turned to agitational mass art and designed decorations for revolutionary festivals. For the first anniversary of the October coup, in 1918, he produced sketches for the colourful decoration of Petrograd: Bolshoi Prospekt on Vasilyevsky Island and a triumphal arch in the Gavan district. From 1919 to 1932 he taught at secondary schools, houses of culture and clubs in Petrograd and Leningrad; the sources call him a professor. In 1924 he joined AKhRR, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, and in 1932 the Union of Artists, the state-controlled professional body. After the revolution he also painted pictures on themes of social construction.

Buchholz’s wife was the sculptor Maria Dillon (1858–1932). He outlived her by ten years and died on 7 May 1942 in besieged Leningrad. He was buried in the Smolensky Lutheran Cemetery (plot 98), beside his wife and her two sisters.