For the high relief Jewish Miser (Miser Counting Money), created in 1865, Mark Antokolsky received a Silver Medal Award from the Academy of Arts, along with a scholarship from the emperor, Alexander II, in a competition. The influence of 16th-century Dutch painting is clear in the composition, as well as in the figure of the miser carved from ivory. At the time, the critic Vladimir Stasov noted the “veracity of expression,” and that the “suit is not invented, not abstract, but taken from life.”

Antokolsky Mark

Antokolsky, Mark Matveevich
1842, Vilna — 1902, Bad Homburg (Germany)

The sculptor Mark Antokolsky moved to St Petersburg in 1862, where he studied under Nikolai Pimenov and Johann Reymers at the Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1871 he started work on his sculpture of Ivan the Terrible (plaster, Kensington Museum, London). During the early 1870s he lived in Italy, before moving to France in 1877, although he visited Russia every year. Antokolsky was awarded a gold medal and Légion d’honneur at the Exposition Universelle, Paris in 1878 and was later made a professor, then full member of the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he held solo exhibitions in 1880 and 1893. He was also an honorary member of Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Akademie der Künste in Berlin and Accademia di Belle Arti in Urbino.