Samuil Galberg

Gal’berg, Samuil Ivanovich 

(also Fridrikh I. Gal’berg). Born Dec. 2 (13), 1787, on the Kattentak Farm in Estonia; died May 10 (22), 1839, in St. Petersburg. Russian sculptor.

Gal’berg studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art (1795-1808) with I. P. Martos. From 1818 to 1828 he lived in Rome on a grant from the Academy of Art and consulted with B. Thorvaldsen. He began to teach at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art in 1829 and became a professor in 1836. He was an exponent of classicism. In his early period he created the idyllic work Faun Harkening to the Sound of the Wind (plaster of paris, 1825; marble, 1830; Russian Museum, Leningrad). In his sculptured portraits Gal’berg sought to render the facial features and the expression as faithfully as possible, while at the same time he used the generalized form of the ancient busts (portraits of V. A. Glinka, plaster of paris, 1819, Russian Museum, and A. S. Pushkin, bronze, 1837, A. S. Pushkin All-Union Museum in the city of Pushkin). Gal’berg did the sketches and plans of a monument to G. R. Derzhavin in Kazan (1833, unveiled in 1847; it has not been preserved) and a monument to N. M. Karamzin in Simbirsk (present-day Ul’ianovsk; 1836, unveiled in 1845).

REFERENCES

Skul’ptor Samuil Ivanovich Gal’berg v ego zagranichnykh pis’makh i zapiskakh 1818-1828. Collected by V. F. Eval’d. St. Petersburg, 1884.
Mroz, E. S. I. Gal’berg. Moscow-Leningrad, 1948.