Ilya Ivanovich Mashkov

Ilya Ivanovich Mashkov was a Russian and Soviet painter, artist, graphic artist and teacher. Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR (1928). Ilya Ivanovich Mashkov was born in the stanitsa Mikhailovskaya (now Volgograd Oblast) into a family of state peasants who were engaged in trade. He was the eldest of nine children and received his primary education at the parish schools of the Mikhailovskaya stanitsa and the khutor Sychyov. From 1892 to 1899 he worked in the grocery trade in the Filonovskaya stanitsa and the town of Borisoglebsk, where he painted shop signs. At that time he also began studying drawing under the guidance of the gymnasium teacher N. A. Evseev.

From 1900 to 1905, and again from 1907 to 1910, Mashkov studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where his mentors included such prominent artists as Leonid Pasternak, Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin, Apollinary Vasnetsov, Abram Arkhipov, Nikolai Kasatkin and Sergei Miloradovich. Mashkov's work early on showed an eccentric style and a penchant for bright colors, hyperbole and large-scale compositions. 

In 1925 Ilya Mashkov became one of the leaders of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia and focused on realism. He produced portraits of production leaders, pioneers and Red Army soldiers, and depicted scenes of happy Soviet life. In this period he often went on creative trips to Crimea, Georgia and Armenia, producing a series of landscapes depicting pioneer camps and resorts.

 

In the early 1930s Mashkov left teaching and for five years returned to his native stanitsa Mikhailovskaya, where he attempted to turn it into an exemplary socialist settlement, going so far as to replace the church cross with the USSR flag and icons with portraits of Lenin and Stalin. He lived in Mikhailovskaya until 1934. During the Great Patriotic War Ilya Mashkov worked at the First Moscow Communist Hospital in Lefortovo, painting portraits of soldiers, doctors and nurses. The artist died on March 20, 1944 at his dacha in Abramtsevo and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.