Born in the village of Adrianopol, Ukraine in 1879, died in Belgrade in 1955, Stepan Kolesnikoff was one of the leading Russian immigrant painters. He began his art studies at the Odessa Art School in the class of A. Popov and K. Kostandi. Being one of the best students, he got the right to enter the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts without exams. He was student of Ilija Repin and A. Kiselev at the Academy between 1903 and 1909. In 1909 he received a golden medal at the exhibition in Munich and an engraved cigarette case as a personal gift from the tsar Nikolay II. Between 1909 and 1919, he exhibited in Berlin, London, Rome and traveled to China and Turkestan. After the Revolution, Stepan Fedorovich Kolesnikov immigrates to Belgrade, Serbia where he stayed until his death. We worked in Belgrade as a professor of the drawing at the Russian-Serbian gymnasium. In the 1920s and 1930s he had many exhibitions in Prague, Paris, Brussels, Holland and London.
Stepan Fedorovich Kolesnikov made several study trips to Macedonia in the period 1920-40, mainly in the northern part. One example of his Macedonian works is the drawing entitled “Basar in Skopje “, in the possession of the fine art gallery Maricevic, Moscow.
