Efim Efimovich Volkov, 1843-1920

XVII Peredvizhnik Exhibition, 1889, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Astrakhan, Saratov, Kharkov, Poltava, Odessa, Kiev, cat no.7-31

In 1898 Efim Volkov  was officially invited by Grand Dukes Sergei Alexandrovich and Pavel Alexandrovich as their personal landscape painter on a tour around Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Greece and the Palestine.  We travelled as far as Odessa.  There, waiting for us was the steamer Kostroma.  Grand Duke Sergei was the chairman of the Palestine Organisation […]. In Palestine they were building a chapel on Mount Eleon, and the Grand Duke was going to [its] consecration.” Ya. D. Minchenkov, Vospominaniya o Peredvizhnikakh, Leningrad, 1963, p79

Evidently a man of good humour, he recounts amusing vignettes from this trip.  We travelled to Jerusalem.  The men on horses and the ladies behind on donkeys.  I rode a horse for the first time in my life.  An Arab horse – actually, not a horse but a devil: it shook and its snorted through its nostrils.  A group of Arabs suddenly appeared and my horse, seeing them, took off in hot pursuit, first trotting, then at full canter.  I dropped the reins and grabbed hold of the mane.  My cap fell off and my beard flew about my shoulders.  I am flying, but I don’t know where to. Ibid, p.80

Efim Volkov showed his works in Peredvizhnik exhibitions from 1878.  He was a close acquaintance of Ivan Shishkin, with whom worked together in the Crimea in 1879.  Pavel Tretyakov acquired several of his landscapes in the mid 1880s which remain in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery.

Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the younger brother of Tsar Alexander III was killed by a bomb while on service in the Kremlin by Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist Ivan Kalyayev in 1905.