Introducing: The Peredvizhniki

The Peredvizhniki (‘Itinerants’ or ‘Wanderers’) were a group of Russian Naturalist painters who created the Society of Wandering Exhibitions in 1870 in order to forge a new type of national art. A number of its members had been part of the “revolt of the fourteen” seven years earlier, in which a band of progressive young artists had resigned from the Academy in St Petersburg in protest at its rigid conservatism. Having cut themselves off from the possibility of state patronage, they relied upon travelling exhibitions to raise their profile and reach a new audience. The Wanderers sought to capture on canvas the great social upheavals that had followed Russia’s abolition of Serfdom in 1861. Spurning Neoclassicism, they used a Realist style of loose brushstrokes in a high-keyed palette to portray peasant and middle-class life. Their works were designed to encourage social reform and inspire self-improvement amongst the marginalized and oppressed. Ilya Repin, Vasily Surikov, Ivan Kramskov, Vasili Vereshchangin and Isaac Levitaan were all members. They disbanded as a society in 1923, but their legacy continued under Communism with the emergence of socialist realism.