Brief Biography-Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge was born in Voronezh in 1831. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg under Pyotr Basin, and the painters Karl Briullov and Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov profoundly influenced his work. He won a gold medal, allowing him to travel and settle in Italy in 1860. In 1863 he became a professor at the Imperial Academy of Arts and moved between religious and historical subjects and portraiture. He bought a farm in Ukraine, where he befriended and painted Leo Tolstoy; he died there in 1894. Unfortunately, many of his works were unaccounted for after his death, and their whereabouts are still unknown.