Grigory Sedov

Biography

Sedov’s greatest success came in 1876: at the exhibition of the Academy of Arts the public saw his “Ivan the Terrible Admiring Vasilisa Melentyeva”. By then the painter had less than eight years left to live.

He was born in Moscow on 24 January 1836 (12 January, Old Style), into a family of meat traders. He began his studies at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, and in 1857 entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Awards followed one after another: in 1858 a small silver medal for drawing, in 1859 a large silver medal for drawing and a small one for a study, in 1860 a large medal for a study. In 1862 his “Travellers Caught in the Rain” and “Oleg’s Campaign Against Constantinople” were shown at an exhibition. Two years later he received a small gold medal for the set-subject painting “Mercury Lulls Argus to Sleep”. In 1866, for the set-subject work “The Conversion of Vladimir to Christianity”, he was given a large gold medal, the title of first-class artist and the right to a six-year stipend for study abroad.

In 1867 Sedov went to Paris and lived there until 1870. He painted two works: “Christ in Prison” and an image of the Holy Trinity in the altar dome of an Orthodox church. It was there that he went blind in one eye. He knew no foreign languages, and the trouble with his eye got in his way too, so life abroad was hard for him. It seems to me that this largely explains the modest result of his years as a stipendiary: there are no documents saying what exactly he failed to do, but the list of his Paris works is itself short. In 1870 he returned to Russia and spent the last three years of the stipend in Moscow, mainly carrying out commissions for churches. In the same year the Academy awarded him the title of academician for the painting “Ivan the Terrible and Malyuta Skuratov”.

Among his other paintings are “A Townswoman of Kursk”, “A Sayanka Woman of Shchigry District” and “Tsar Alexis Chooses a Bride”. In the Church of the Holy Trinity at the Pokrovsky Gate in Moscow he painted the four Evangelists, larger than life, and eight prophets. For the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, according to some accounts, he made a “Baptism of Saint Olga”. Trouble with his eye often kept him from work for long periods, so everything he produced is comparatively small in volume.

In 1883 he was awarded the Order of St Anna, third class. Sedov died in Moscow on 27 April 1884 (15 April, New Style).