Nikanor Grigor'evic Cernecov Art for Sale at Auction

Painter, Water colorist

(b 1805; d 1879) Russian painter. Nikanor Chernetsov was a son of an icon painter and a younger brother of the well-known artist Grigorii Chernetsov. In 1823, he won a scholarship to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg as a landscape painter under Professor Maxim Nikiforovich Vorobiev. After graduation from the Academy in 1827, Chernetsov traveled extensively throughout the Caucasus with the chairman of the Imperial Society for the Encouragements of the Arts from 1829 until 1831. From 1833-36 he worked in the services of a Russian Governor General M.S. Vorontsov in the Crimea. Chernetsov’s paintings became so popular that one of his 1832 landscapes was hung in the office of the famous Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin. During this period his travels took him the full length of the Black Sea coast; to Tbilisi and as far as the border with Turkey. He observed the local nature, towns, ancient ruins, customs, clothes, and various ethnic groups living in the Crimea. He executed several hundred pencil studies, watercolors, gouaches and sepia drawings from which he would then build up his large scale oil paintings. In the 1840s, together with his brother, Chernetsov visited Italy, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Greece, and Turkey. Chernetsov created what was essentially a painted encyclopedia of the Russian South. Evidently influenced by his tutor, Vorobiov who had been official war artist during the Napoleonic campaign of 1813-14, many of Chernetsov's paintings recorded contemporary events, such as a military exercise. (Credit: Sotheby’s, London, The Russian Sale, May 31, 2006, lot 10; Sotheby’s, New York, Russian Art, April 16, 2007, lot 318)