Ivan Ivanovych Trush (Ukrainian: Іван Іванович Труш, TROOSH; 18 January 1869 – 21 March 1941) was a Ukrainian impressionist painter, a master of landscape and portraiture, an art critic, and active community patron of arts in Galicia or Halychyna – a historical region in western Ukraine. He was a son in law of Mykhailo Drahomanov.
Starting from 1898, Trush lived and worked in Lviv where he became acquainted with Ivan Franko, a poet and writer. In 1899, his first art exhibit was presented to the public in Lviv. It was at this time that Trush became involved with the Shevchenko Scientific Society, for which he completed "a number of works of art, primarily portraits".[1]
Trush's travels took him to Italy, Egypt, and Palestine. When back at home, Trush founded and organized the first professional art societies in Galicia,[1] the Society for the Development of Rus' Art (1898), the Society of Friends of Ukrainian Art (1905) and its first exhibition of Ukrainian artists, which drew participation from Kyiv-based artists.
The painter's activism, vast and dynamic creative output, numbered over 6,000 works,[1] inspired a rebirth of painting in Galicia.
Ivan Trush, one of the most prominent Ukrainian impressionists, began his work with the rebirth of Galician painting. He – alongside such figures as ethnographers Volodymyr Hnatyuk and Filaret Kolessa, poet Ivan Franko, the museum's first director Illarion Svientsitsky – played a leading role in the establishment of the Lviv National Museum.[2]
In the late 1930s, Ivan Trush's painting "Landscape from the outskirts of Naples" was presented to the National Museum in Kraków. During the Second World War, more than 120 paintings, including this work by I. Trush, disappeared from the museum without a trace. These paintings were included in the database of war losses of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland. In March 2018, this painting and two other works by Polish masters appeared in the list of lots of one of the Warsaw auctions.[4] This finding indicates that the paintings stolen by the Germans probably never left the country, but became objects of looting and theft in post-war Poland.[5]
^Kasyan, Lyudmyla. Ivan Trush - a painterArchived 2008-01-07 at the Wayback Machine. Research Institute of Ukrainian Studies (Ukrainoznavstva). Last accessed: January, 2008. (in Ukrainian)
