Grigory Gagarin was a Russian amateur artist, illustrator, art critic, and architect. He served as Oberhofmeister of the Imperial Court and vice president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts. Gagarin studied at the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the Sorbonne, Paris, while attending lectures on mathematics, jurisprudence, philology, and philosophy. He illustrated Pushkin’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan and some of his poems, making him successful as an artist.
In 1848, he began serving in Tbilisi, under the Viceroy of the Caucasus, Count Mikhail Semionovich Vorontsov, where, in addition to his military and administrative duties, he engaged in decorating the cities of the Caucasus: he designed and built a theater in Tbilisi, frescoed the Tbilisi Sioni Cathedral, and restored the old frescoes in the Betania Monastery.Living with his wife Sofia Gagarina in Tbilisi until 1854, he painted portraits of representatives of the Georgian aristocracy and made sketches of portraits and costumes of residents from various regions of Georgia and the mountain villages of the Caucasus.
He created watercolor compositions depicting scenes of everyday life and holidays of Tbilisi residents and landscapes of different parts of Georgia. His works, reproduced in lithography and published in separate albums, enjoyed great popularity among art lovers of that time.
Gagarin’s sketches and lithographs are kept in the Art Museum of Georgia and the Museum and the Georgian Parliament National Libraries.