Kristjan Raud

Biography

Kristjan Raud’s first bookplate is dated 1900: a pen drawing made for his brother Paul. In time there were 91 such sheets, counting designs. He himself called them a rest between larger works. In the early twentieth century he was almost the only person in Estonia who made them.

He was born on 22 October 1865 (10 October, Old Style) in the village of Kirik (now Kirikuküla) in Viru-Jaagupi Parish, then in the Governorate of Livonia; by other accounts, Estonia. He had a twin brother, Paul, also a future painter. The brothers spent their childhood in Meriküla, where their father worked as a field ranger; he died early. Kristjan attended the village and parish schools, then the district school in Rakvere, where teaching was in German. Next came the Tartu Realschule (a secondary school with a modern curriculum) and the teachers' seminary, which he completed in 1887, followed by several years of work as a teacher.

In 1892 he went to Saint Petersburg. His drawings caught the eye of Johann Köler, regarded as the founder of Estonian painting, who advised him to apply to the Imperial Academy of Arts. Raud studied there from 1893 to 1897. His early works show Estonian peasants, their labour and their cottages. Soon black-and-white graphic work was added to oils, and later most of his output consisted of charcoal drawings.

Then Germany. In Düsseldorf he worked with Peter Janssen; in Munich, from 1899, he took lessons at Anton Ažbe’s school, and from 1901 to 1903 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts.

He returned to Tartu in 1903 and for ten years taught at the Realschule. Around 1904 he founded his own studio for young artists, wrote for newspapers and joined the circle of Young Estonia (the cultural movement of the Estonian intelligentsia) and the Estonian Literary Society. When the folklorist Jakob Hurt died in 1907, Raud was the first to demand a museum that would hold the oral heritage Hurt had collected and also material peasant culture, which was little valued at the time. In 1909 he became one of the founders of the Estonian National Museum and an organiser of its first collecting campaigns. In 1910 a collection of poems by Juhan Liiv appeared with his illustrations.

With the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914, he moved to Tallinn to live with his brother and again taught at several schools, among them the State School of Applied Arts. In February 1919 he became head of the department of art and monuments in the new Ministry of Education of the Republic of Estonia; in those years the country’s first law on the protection of monuments was drafted. He was among the founders of the Tallinn Museum, from which the Art Museum of Estonia grew, and led the Tallinn Estonian Museum Society, later becoming its honorary member. In 1919 he also completed the painting “The Maiden of the Grave”. In 1923–1924 he was in charge of the protection of monuments in Tartu, and then he left the civil service and devoted himself entirely to his paintings and drawings.

His own style, in the view of scholars, took shape after a trip to Paris in 1926: heavy, angular forms and silhouettes rising above a low horizon. It seems to me that they do recall the sharp lines of peasant buildings and the plain ornament on wooden household objects. He took many subjects from folklore: spirits, house goblins, personified forces of nature, tales of flying lakes.

In 1924 Raud married Elviira Tischler, the daughter of his landlords; they had three children. From 1929 the family lived in Nõmme, in a house built to the artist’s sketches, and in 1937 the street was named after him.

The high point was “Kalevipoeg”, issued in 1935 by the Estonian Literary Society. Most of the 21 illustrations were made in 1933–1935, and the vignettes and ornamental initials were commissioned from the wood engraver Hando Mugasto. The print run was huge for Estonia, but the visual language of the drawings seemed incomprehensible to many in the 1930s. In spring 1937 the Tartu Art and Literature Club even staged a “trial of Kalevipoeg”, which the older generation remembered. Raud returned to the theme to the last year of his life: about two hundred works on the epic survive from 1913 to 1943. In 1935 the University of Tartu made him an honorary doctor, and in 1938 he received the Order of the Estonian Red Cross. In spring 1940 a major exhibition was held, and the government declared that year the Year of Kristjan Raud.

On 13 October 1941 his fifteen-year-old son Kristjan-Paul was killed in an explosion in the garden of the house. Raud’s last works are large charcoal drawings made in summer at Pedaspea and Riguldi: old farmyards, roads leading into groves, reapers in a rye field. He drew even in hospital.

Raud died in Tallinn, under the German occupation, on 19 May 1943; the funeral was modest, for close family only, at Rahumäe Cemetery. A prize in his name was established in 1973, and from 1992 to 2011 his portrait appeared on the one-kroon banknote.