Ge, Nikolai (also: Gay, Gué), b 27 February 1831 in Voronezh, Russia, d 13 April 1894 at Ivanovskyi khutir (now the village of Shevchenko), Bakhmach county, Chernihiv gubernia. Russian painter of French origin; one of the founders of the Peredvizhniki group of Russian populist painters. Ge studied at Kyiv University (1847) and Saint Petersburg University (1848–9), and at the Saint Petersburg Art Academy (1850–7), where he became a professor in 1863. Ge's realist works are characterized by their psychological depth; his early works show the influence of his teacher Karl Briullov and A. Ivanov. Ge executed many paintings on historical subjects, portraits (including one of Mykola Kostomarov, 1870), a self-portrait (1892–3), several Italian landscapes (such as Vineyard, 1858), and a famous cycle of works on New Testament themes (such as The Last Supper, 1861) exhibiting the influence of Leo Tolstoy's ideas. From 1876 Ge lived in the Chernihiv region, where he spread Tolstoy's ideas among the peasants and took a keen interest in Ukrainian culture, particularly the works of Taras Shevchenko. Many of his later paintings have Ukrainian peasants and landscapes as their subjects. Ge helped establish Mykola I. Murashko's Kyiv Drawing School. Large collections of his works are in the Kyiv Museum of Russian Art and the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow.