Among Russian artists, the second half of Kramskoy's past seems most of all "European." Kramskoy's restrained, intelligent and deep art is inseparable from his personality. "He was much more than comme il faut, he was a very decent person both in appearance and in internal content. Decency and nobility, despite his origin, were in his very nature, well-mannered and gracefully decent to the last little thing," - this is how the critic Pavel Kovalevsky determined Kramskoy, of all Kramskoy's contemporaries, perhaps the most susceptible to the essence of the artist's work.