Vilhelms Purvītis

Biography

The painting “The Last Rays” (in Latvian “Pēdējie stari”) brought Purvītis the title of artist and a grant for study abroad in 1897. It was shown at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, where it received a bronze medal, and at the Munich Secession exhibition.

He was born on 3 March 1872 (20 February, Old Style) at the Jaužu farmstead in Zaube Parish, Riga district, Governorate of Livonia, in a miller’s family. He attended the parish school, and then the family moved to the Governorate of Vitebsk, where his father took over a mill. At the town school in Drissa a teacher noticed the boy’s drawing and advised him to take up painting. Then came two years at his father’s mill in Smiltene Parish, where he saved money for his studies. In 1890 Purvītis came to St Petersburg and entered the Imperial Academy of Arts as a non-matriculated student. There he became close to Janis Rozentāls and Johan Valter; in 1898 the three of them travelled across Europe. At first he painted pictures from studies made from nature. He came to Kuindzhi in his last years of study: according to some accounts in 1895, according to others in his final year. He graduated from the Academy with the Grand Gold Medal. Russian collectors, among them Pavel Tretyakov and Botkin, bought his paintings, and in 1902 in Lyon his “Northern Night” and “March Sun” won the Grand Prix.

In 1902 he travelled to Spitsbergen to see what northern snow looked like. To my mind, all his later painting grew out of this interest in snow and meltwater. He exhibited in St Petersburg and moved in the circle of the World of Art (Mir iskusstva). From 1901 he lived in Riga.

After 1905, according to some accounts, he found himself in a difficult position among the Latvian intelligentsia, and in 1906 he left for Reval (Tallinn), where for three years he taught drawing at a secondary school. In Reval his first city views appeared, for example “Reval in the Fog”.

In 1909 Purvītis returned to Riga as director of the city art school. Among his pupils were Romans Suta, Jēkabs Kazaks and Valdemārs Tone. When the front approached Riga in 1915, the school was evacuated to Petrograd, and in 1916 it was closed. In 1917 the painter went to Norway for treatment and held his first solo exhibition in Oslo. He returned to German-occupied Riga in 1918. In 1919, before the end of the War of Independence, he became director of the Riga City Art Museum (until 1940), professor in the architecture faculty of the University of Latvia and first rector of the Latvian Academy of Art (until 1934). He led the Academy in part through its landscape studio, which he headed until 1941, or by other accounts until 1944. At first his manner was thought old-fashioned, but a school took shape, and he had many followers who continued his line. He organised exhibitions of Latvian art in European cities. His honours include the Order of the Three Stars, third and second class (1926, 1928), the French Legion of Honour and the Cross of Recognition, first class (1938).

He showed the public very little. Thousands of canvases and drawings were kept at his home. Some works lost during the Civil War in Russia he re-created in the 1920s from reproductions and from memory.

After 1940 he was dismissed as museum director but continued to teach at the Academy. His last exhibition in Riga in his lifetime took place in 1942.

In the summer of 1944 in Jelgava, where most of his belongings were stored, everything was lost in air raids; his house and studio were destroyed as well. He left for Liepāja, from there for Danzig, and then Germany, fearing the arrival of the Red Army. Purvītis died on 14 January 1945 in Bad Nauheim, in a sanatorium. His remains were moved to Riga’s Forest Cemetery in 1994. Since 2008 a prize in his name has been awarded in Latvia, and in 2024 a Riga street that had previously been named after Ivan Turgenev was renamed for him.