My great-grandfather Dmitri was the owner of „Merkury”, a large river navigation company in St.Petersburg in Russia. But he was also a lover of fine arts, the owner of a private art collection and an icon expert.
My grandfather Vladimir was a publisher. Likewise his father, my grandfather was also an art lover and continued buying art into the collection he inherited from his father for the rest of his life.
My father Igor was a documentary film maker and an art photographer who again inherited from his grandfather, not only the family art collection, but also the particular love for icons.
So I was born in a family with a devotion to the art of icons for generations. But I went further... developing a deep interest in the history of icons and the techniques and technology of icon painting. I started studying the old manuscripts and examining the secrets of icon painting. I learned to restore them and then began to paint icons myself.
In year 1995 I opened an icon painting and restoration studio in Tallinn and - using this also as a workshop - I taught and instructed interested young artists in the techniques of icon restoration and painting. Individually, but mostly collectively, we made icons both for private clients and churches, including large scale iconostases for churches in Estonia and abroad. After they were professionally trained the young icon painters and restorers left my studio to start working on their own, still producing new icons for an increasing number of our clients in Estonia and abroad.
In 1997 I was appointed as a lecturer in the art and techniques of icon painting at the College of Applied Arts in Tallinn and since 1999 at the Estonian Academy of Art in Tallinn.
All these years I have also been active with buying and selling of old icons. Hundreds of the most precious and unique icons passed my eyes and went through my hands. This trade has further deepened my knowledge of icons and my professionalism. This helped to establish my international reputation among many icon experts and art historians.
I hope with this Internet site to provide a new service to the growing number of icon collectors, experts and restorers around the world. For my initiative to launch this site I owe many thanks to my dear colleagues in Tallinn - first of all to Jury Manuilov – as well as to many icon dealers, gallery owners and icon collectors in different places around the world. But I am particularly indebted for their support and advice to Russian leading icon experts Irina Shalina from the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, Viktor Sorokatyi from the Andrei Rublyov Museum in Moscow and Arkady Yatcenko, icon expert and collector, also from Moscow.
I am sure that this new web site will further strengthen our relations and help achieving our common goal of jointly promoting the art of iconography around the world.
I thank you all!
Nikolai Merkuriev
Tallinn, February 2005