Alexandr Vladimirovich Makovsky

Alexandr Vladimirovich Makovsky was born on 5 April 1869 (24 March, Old Style) in Moscow, into a family of painters. His father was Vladimir Yegorovich Makovsky, a leading genre painter and teacher, and his uncles included Konstantin Makovsky and Nikolai Makovsky. He received his first artistic training at home under his father, then studied from 1884 to 1889 at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, working in the studios of Illarion Pryanishnikov and Vasily Polenov as well as continuing with his father. He was awarded a large silver medal at graduation for the painting Connoisseurs of Art.

He then spent several years in Paris, studying at the private studio of the French painter Fernand Cormon, roughly from 1889 to 1893. On returning to Russia he completed a further course from 1894 to 1895 at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, in the workshop of Ilya Repin.

Makovsky began exhibiting with the Peredvizhniki, the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions, in 1899, and continued to show with the group until 1922. He taught at the Imperial Academy of Arts from 1898, was named an academician of painting in 1911, and later served as professor and head of the Academy's painting school, though the exact year of that appointment is not confirmed in available sources. In 1924 he began exhibiting with the newly formed Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, known as AKhRR. He died on 26 October 1924 in Leningrad, and Russian biographical sources report that he was buried at the Smolensk Orthodox Cemetery in St. Petersburg.

Available sources describe Makovsky mainly in biographical and art-historical terms, tracing his training, his membership in the Peredvizhniki, and his academic career, rather than through sustained contemporary criticism. No verbatim assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, and none is reproduced here.

Makovsky's auction market is thin compared with the wider Makovsky family name, and no confirmed, sourced public sale price for a specific work by this artist could be verified as of this writing. His works appear in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Scientific Research Museum of Arts of the Russian Academy of Arts, and the Perm State Art Gallery, among others, which supports institutional interest even where the auction record cannot be documented here.

Because no confirmed public auction result for Makovsky could be verified in the available sources, prospective buyers should treat any price information encountered elsewhere with caution and confirm it directly against primary auction-house records before relying on it. No catalogue raisonne or certificate of authenticity program has been identified, so provenance and comparison to known museum holdings, particularly at the State Tretyakov Gallery and the Perm State Art Gallery, matter more than they would for an artist with a fuller sale history. Buyers should also take care to distinguish his work from that of his father, Vladimir Yegorovich Makovsky, and his uncles Konstantin and Nikolai Makovsky, all of whom shared the family name and are far more heavily traded.