Artist and Composer. A unique figure in the history of European arts, has left a profound imprint on Lithuanian culture. Over a short, decade-long career, he composed nearly four hundred musical compositions, including two large-scale symphonic poems, an overture, two piano sonatas, a string quartet, and a cantata for chorus and orchestra.  During those same brief years he also created approximately four hundred paintings and etchings, as well as several literary works and poems. His active involvement in the Lithuanian national movement and his idealist self-sacrifice for the sake of artistic ideals show him as a typical artist of the Romantic mold. Mikalojus managed to be at the heart of the creation of the Lithuanian Artists Union and actively organized and participated in the first three exhibitions of Lithuanian artists, organized and directed Lithuanian Choruses in Warsaw, Vilnius, and St. Petersburg, and was the first Lithuanian professional composer not only to take interest in Lithuanian folk songs, but to collect and publish them. His passionate approach to life is perhaps best summarized by his refusal to accept an offered safe teaching position at the Warsaw Institute of Music. Following the German Symbolists in his paintings, exploring synaesthetic ideas, fashionable at the time, and exploring chromatic and harmonic possibilities of the tonal major-minor system in his music compositions, Čiurlionis stands as typical artist of the late Nineteenth-early Twentieth century Europe. H is latest mature paintings, based on detailed musical compositional techniques, and piano compositions in which tonal writing is blended with proto-serial techniques and constructive use of short rhythmic, melodic and harmonic complexes, stand as examples of totally unprecedented plastic-aural experiences unique in the history of European art. In 1907 he became acquainted with Sofija Kymantaitė (1886–1958), an art critic. Through this association Čiurlionis learned to speak better Lithuanian. Early in 1909 he married Sofija. At the end of that year he traveled to St. Petersburg, where he exhibited some of his paintings. On Christmas Eve Mikalojus fell into a profound depression and at the beginning of 1910 was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital “Czerwony Dwór” (Red Manor) in Pustelnik, northeast of Warsaw. While a patient there he died at 35 years of age.  He never saw his daughter Danutė (1910–1995). (bio by: Shock)  Family links:  Spouse:  Sofija Kymantaite Ciurlioniene (1886 – 1958)* *Calculated relationship