This statuette belongs to a series of portraits depicting Ginzburg’s contemporaries, famous masters of visual art and literature. In total, about 30 small figures were created, as a rule, working with the subjects themselves. The sculptor recalled how the composer and musician Anton Rubinstein posed for him in his room at the European Hotel in St Petersburg. The informality of the poses and gestures in Ginzburg’s work, combined with their absolute physiognomic accuracy, contributed to the sculptor’s enormous popularity.

Ginzburg Ilya

Ginzburg, Ilya Yakovlevich (1859, Hrodno — 1939, Leningrad)

The sculptor Ilya Ginzburgstudied under Marcus Antokolsky from 1871 to 1878, then for a further eight years at the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he was granted full membership in 1911. Ginzburg was an exponent of genre sculpture and took special interest in subjects related to childhood. He created numerous portrait statuettes and busts of famous artists, writers, scientists, and public figures: Vladimir Stasov (1889), Dmitry Mendeleev (1890), Leo Tolstoy (1891), Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1892), Vasily Vereshchagin (1892), Ivan Shishkin (1892) and others, as well as tombstones of Vladimir Stasov (1908), Mark Antokolsky (1909) and Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak (1915).