Niko Pirosmani, whose real complete name was Nikolai Aslanovich Pirosmanashvili, was born on May 5th, 1862 in a peasant family in the Georgian village of Mirzaani, province of Kakheti, a region widely regarded as the home of the best wines of Georgia.
Pirosmani in Georgia is famous for his paintings, which often have animals and people who eat and who serve food as subject, but is less popular abroad.
His parents, respectively, Aslan Pirosmani and Toklikishvili Tekle, were farmers, had a couple of cows, a small vineyard, and with it lived in dignity, along with two other daughters, Mariam and Pepe, and Niko.
In 1870 his father suddenly died and the relatively quiet life of the family Pirosmani inevitably finished.
Orphaned and given to the care of his older sisters, moved with them in 1870 to Tbilisi, where he worked as a servant for a number of rich families, learning to read and write Russian and Georgian.
In 1876 he returned to Mirzaani and, working as a pastor, began gradually to take care of the innate passion for painting.
In 1890 he worked as a train conductor, in 1895 as a designer of signs, in 1893 founded his own dairy farm.
Niko Pirosmani lived and died in poverty, in life his talent was never recognized by his countrymen.
His reputation, sadly posthumously, was awarded for his special painting technique called "primitive". Among his best known works, now we can quote: "Women with children of Georgia", "A woman with flower and umbrella "," Actress Margarita "," the feast of the five princes. "
Pirosmani deeply loved Margarita, a French actress who visited Georgia.
A woman who he loved forever so much so that to show his great love, bought for her enough flowers to fill up the square in front of the window of the hotel where she was.
In his manuscript, the writer Konstantin Paustovskii describing the place overflowing with flowers, traces a beautiful landscape, a place with so many carts full of flowers to the edges, all sprinkled with drops of dew billion, in all colors of the rainbow.
Pirosmani’s special love became so famous, and it was later told in a poem by Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky.
The fantastic, surreal love story between Niko and Margarita, also gave inspiration for a song by Alla Pugacheva, entitled "A million red roses".
Margarita was also a great source of inspiration for Pirosmani, and she almost always appears in every painting of him.
He died very poor for malnutrition and liver failure, in a cellar that he used as a shelter, on the night before Easter 1918.
He was buried in the cemetery of the town of Nino.
Many other directors got him as subject for short films or documentaries, and he was the subject of the film "Pirosmani" by Shengelaya Giorgi (1969) which won the Grand Prix at the Chicago Film Festival in 1972.
