Pavel Korin

In 1911, he worked as an apprentice to Mikhail Nesterov on frescoes of The Intercession Church at the Convent of Martha and Mary (Marfo-Mariinsky) on Bolshaya Ordynka Street in Moscow.

In 1916, he worked on frescoes for the mausoleum of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna at The Intercession Church at the Convent of Martha and Mary.

In accordance with the wishes of the Grand Duchess, he traveled to Yaroslavl and Rostov to study traditional frescoes of antique Russian churches.

In 1919-1920 he worked at the Anatomic theatre of Moscow State University, as he thought that, as a painter, he needed deeper knowledge of the human anatomy.

In 1927, Korin's aquarelle Artist's studio and his oil landscape My Motherland were bought by the Tretyakov gallery, showing recognition from the Soviets.

In the 1940s, he painted many portraits of members of the Soviet intelligentsia (including Leonid Leonidov, Mikhail Nesterov, Alexey Tolstoy, Kachalov and Nadezhda Peshkova (Gorky's daughter in law)).

He painted the fresco Match to the Future for the Palace of Soviets in the Moscow Kremlin and a Triptych devoted to Alexander Nevsky.

His mosaics decorate the stations Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya, Arbatskaya (Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya Line) and Novoslobodskaya, and also the Main Hall (Актовый Зал) of Moscow State University.

He also won an impressive list of Soviet awards in the 1950s and 1960s: Pavel Korin died in Moscow on 22 November 1967 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery.

The biography of Korin shows an accomplished Soviet painter and a prominent art figure, but the job he had considered the main work of his life was left unfinished.

Korin feverishly painted people present at the burial service for Tikhon, often the last survivors of families of Russian nobility, or dissident priests, soon to be destroyed.

Gorky believed that the painting showing the last parade of the Orthodox Church, depicting the tragedy and at the same time the misery of those people who would disappear into irrelevancy, would be accepted and even well received by the Government.

He produced dozens of large (more than life size), detailed paintings that he preferred to call etudes for the Farewell to Rus masterpiece; he worked on composition.

In his lifetime, he had not put a single brushstroke on the canvas - forty-two years of preparational work was not enough for Pavel Korin.

Moreover, for a long time, none of the stations had portraits of him thanks to de-Stalinization, which came after Krushchev’s speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.