Konstantin Savitsky

Konstantin Savitsky (1844–1905) was a Russian genre and history painter and a prominent member of the Peredvizhniki. A student of Kramskoi, Savitsky specialized in large-format social-realist scenes of peasant and worker life, most famously Repair Work on the Railway (1874), a frieze of exhausted navvies that became a textbook image of Russian industrial labor. He contributed the bear cubs to Shishkin's iconic Morning in a Pine Forest. From 1897 he directed the Penza Art School, shaping provincial Russian art education.

Savitsky painted with strong academic draftsmanship and a sober earth-tone palette, organizing his crowded compositions around focal points of human effort or suffering. His handling is more detailed than painterly.

Savitsky brought Russian social realism to a monumental narrative scale and shaped a generation of provincial Russian painters through his directorship at Penza.