Petras Rimša

Biography

The sculpture “The Lithuanian School, 1864–1904” was shown at the First Lithuanian Art Exhibition in Vilnius, which opened on 9 January 1907. It was one of eleven works Rimša showed there. A mother sits at her spinning wheel teaching her child to read in Lithuanian, while outside the Lithuanian press ban, which forbade printing in the Latin alphabet, is in force. The work is also known as “The School of Hardship”. In 1993 it was reproduced on the 5 litas banknote, which was soon replaced by a coin. A large bronze copy was cast in 1957.

Rimša was born on 23 November 1881 (11 November, Old Style) in the village of Naudžiai, now in Vilkaviškis District, Lithuania, into a peasant family; by other accounts his birthday was 3 November. When he was in his seventeenth year his father died. His elder brother Juozas was exiled to Russia for distributing banned printed matter, and Petras was left with his mother, his sisters and his younger brother. Farm work did not attract him: from childhood he drew and carved wood. He went to Vilnius, then to Warsaw, where he studied under a wood carver and attended a general school; by other accounts, in 1900–1903 he studied there privately under Pius Weloński. In 1903–1904 he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the studio of Antonin Mercié. In 1904–1905 he was at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts under Konstanty Laszczka. He never received a diploma; according to some accounts, Laszczka moved him to the status of auditor after half a year, judging him untalented. On his return Rimša began to work independently and entered Lithuanian cultural life. In 1907 he became one of the founders of the Lithuanian Art Society, together with Čiurlionis, Kalpokas, Žmuidzinavičius and Sklėrius.

His second well-known work was “The Ploughman” (1907): a peasant and an emaciated horse pulling a plough with the last of its strength. It was shown at the Second Lithuanian Art Exhibition in 1908. One copy is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the original is, by some accounts, in the Lithuanian Art Museum. In 1910 “The Ploughman” won the Stroganov Prize. The sequels, “Enough of That Yoke” (1909) and “Final” (1910), were received less well, and I think the sculptor himself was dissatisfied with them.

In 1909–1911 Rimša studied at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in Saint Petersburg. There he tried metal inlay and graphic work, influenced by Japonism and Art Nouveau. He spent the First World War in Russia. In Smolensk in 1916 he made “In Torment”: a woman in ornamented clothes, a stylised work overloaded with detail and quite unlike his early realism. It was followed by “The Thinker” (1921), “Night and Day” (1922) and “The Knight” (1931).

In 1919 he returned to Lithuania, to Vilnius, but after the Poles took over the Vilnius Region he moved to Kaunas. What he had lived through showed in his medals: in the 1920s at least five were struck in support of Lithuania in its dispute over the Vilnius Region, and the medal “Union Desired” (1925) shows Poland as a deranged woman devouring Lithuanian children. He lived in Berlin (1920–1924), travelled to London to study Rodin and Bourdelle (1923–1924), and worked in Italy to improve his craft (1928). In 1928 and 1935–1938 he was in the United States, where he held exhibitions. From 1923 Rimša made chiefly medals and portrait reliefs: anniversaries of Vilnius and Vytautas, the Klaipėda Revolt of 1923, Donelaitis (1955). He modelled portraits of Motiejus Valančius (1904), Jonas Basanavičius (1906), Žemaitė (1926) and his own mother (1910). He illustrated books by Vydūnas and Pranas Mašiotas. After the Second World War his medals acquired the required Soviet attributes, but on the 1947 medal for Martynas Mažvydas he placed lines from the then banned national anthem, “Tautiška giesmė”. He received the title of Merited Art Worker of the Lithuanian SSR in 1945 and that of People’s Artist of the republic in 1951 (by other accounts, 1954).

His last medal, of 1959, shows a self-portrait on the obverse and, on the reverse, an exhibition of his works, among them “The Lithuanian School” and “The Ploughman”. Rimša died on 2 October 1961 in Kaunas and was buried in Petrašiūnai Cemetery. Memorial plaques were put up in 1967 and 1991 on the two Kaunas houses where he had lived.