Serf painter-poet who became Ukraine’s national voice
Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) was a Ukrainian poet, artist, and national figure born to serfs under Russian rule. Art talent won him Imperial Academy fellowship in Saint Petersburg; return home drew him into the national movement before exile. He was born 9 March 1814 in Morintsy after the third Polish partition.
The family moved in 1816 to Kyrylivka (now Shevchenkove) on Engelhardt lands where father and grandfather had been born. Childhood myths include seeking pillars that prop up the sky and being found by chumaks.
His mother Kateryna died in 1823, and his father Hryhoriy, left with six children, remarried a widow from Morintsy. The boy travelled the open steppe with his father, who had become a chumak, before the father died of a chill in 1825. Taras then herded pigs, served a drunken village precentor named Bohorsky, and in February 1827, at thirteen, ran away hoping to become an artist, only to return and work as a shepherd.
When the landowner Engelhardt died in 1828, his son Pavel made the fourteen-year-old a kitchen servant and court page at the Vilshana estate. In Vilno in December 1829 Pavel caught him painting a portrait of the Cossack general Matvei Platov at night and boxed his ears, but later let him study art in Vilno and Warsaw, where a love for a Polish noble girl, Dunia Gusikowska, first stirred his belief in equality across classes. The November Uprising of 1830 drove the household out of Warsaw to St. Petersburg.
Copying statues in the Summer Gardens, he met the Ukrainian painter Ivan Soshenko, who introduced him to the writer Yevhen Hrebinka, the painter Alexey Venetsianov and eventually Karl Briullov. Engelhardt agreed to free him for 2,500 rubles, raised when Briullov painted a portrait of the poet Vasily Zhukovsky as a lottery prize whose winning ticket was drawn by the tsarina, and in 1838 Shevchenko left serfdom behind. As Briullov's student at the Imperial Academy he won a silver medal in April 1839 and began working in oils.
Source: Taras Shevchenko
