Fyodor Kalmyk: Russian artist who sketched the Parthenon during the years of export of its marbles

Fedor Kalmyk

Russian artist Fedor Kalmyk arrived in Athens with Lord Elgin’s groupto draw antiquity of the Acropolis. His works preserved the appearance of the Parthenon in the years when they already started from there remove sculptures.

At the beginning of the 19th century, a Russian artist found himself in Athens Fedor Kalmyk – a man with an unusual destiny, whom history has almost completely obscured by the big names of the lord Elgin, British diplomats and museum collectors. He came not as a military man, not as an official, and not as a dealer in antiquities. Kalmyk was an artist: he was hired to paint the ancient monuments of the Acropolis. But it was precisely during these years that the fraudulent operationafter which a significant part of his sculptures ended up in London.

Fedor Kalmyk, known in Western sources as Feodor Iwanowitsch Kalmück or Feodor Ivannoff, was an artist of Kalmyk origin. His childhood and early biography remain confusing, but it is known that he received an art education in Germany and Italy, and then worked among European masters and art patrons.

At the end of 1799, Kalmyk was recruited to work for a British diplomat Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin. Elgin was serving as the British ambassador to Constantinople at the time and was gathering a group of artists, architects, moulders, and draughtsmen to work in Athens.

Initially the official target looked almost harmless: sketches, measurements, taking casts, fixing antiquities. European aristocrats have long regarded ancient Greece as a vast storehouse of inspiration, decoration and future museum collections. The word “preservation” on such expeditions often meant anything other than keeping the monument in place.

Acropolis through the eyes of Kalmyk

In Athens, Kalmyk painted the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, the temple of Athena Nike, the Hephaestion, the monument to Lysicrates and other antiquities. His works are of particular value today: they record the state of Athens monuments at the beginning of the 19th century, until later destruction, restoration and loss.

The British Museum houses an album from 80 drawings by Fyodor Kalmykcreated for Elgin in 1801–1802. These are not engravings, not decorative copies and not late fantasies. Here is rare visual evidence of what the Acropolis looked like at a time when its ancient ensemble still retained much greater integrity.

We publish the most interesting images from the point of view of the author of the article

Kalmyk was not the organizer of the export of marbles and did not make decisions about the dismantling of sculptures. However, he found himself within the same expedition, which first claimed to have scientifically recorded the monuments, and then began to remove metopes, fragments of the frieze and pediment sculptures from the Parthenon.

Between 1801 and 1803, Elgin’s agents removed dozens of architectural and sculptural elements from the Acropolis. Parts of the Parthenon, elements of the Erechtheion, Propylaea and other monuments went to London. What are now called the Elgin Marbles were then crated, loaded onto ships, and shipped out of Athens as a private collection.

An artist inside someone else’s operation

This is why the fate of Kalmyk looks especially contradictory. He came to watch, draw and save on paper. But his work turned out to be part a process in which monuments were not only depicted, but also dismantled.

His drawings do not justify Elgin’s actions. Quite the opposite: today they allow us to see what has been lost from the uniform appearance of the Acropolis. Kalmyk recorded the ensemble before its parts became museum exhibits thousands of kilometers from Athens.

This is an important detail for understanding the era. Europe at the beginning of the 19th century simultaneously admired ancient Greece and treated it as a territory from which antiquities could be removed under the pretext of science, art, diplomacy or “saving” monuments.

The history of Kalmyk shows that cultural plunder rarely looks like a straight scene with crowbars and bags. Sometimes it starts with a pencil, a sketchbook, permission to sketch, and polite words about preserving the heritage. Then workers, boxes, ships and museum display cases appear.

After Athens

Elgin’s plan to use his group’s drawings for a large-scale publication in London was never fully realized. Elgin himself soon faced severe financial problems, illness and personal ruin. His collection was eventually sold to the British state in 1816 for £35,000 and given to the British Museum.

Kalmyk’s drawings also remain in British collections. For him they were part of his professional work. For history, it is evidence of an era when Athens became both an object of admiration and the prey of European collecting.

Fyodor Kalmyk was not the man who destroyed Greece. But he was close to those who did it, and left rare images of the Acropolis at the moment when one of the greatest monuments of antiquity was turned into a set of separate museum objectsV.

Read about how Lord Elgin got the opportunity to export the marbles, why his Ottoman “permission” raises serious doubts, and how the Parthenon sculptures ended up in London “Who Destroyed Greece: Lord Elgin and the Sack of the Parthenon”.

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