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Mikhail Osipovich Mikeshin (; 9 February 1835 – 19 January 1896) was a Russian artist who regularly worked for the Romanov family and designed a number of outdoor statues in the major cities of the Russian Empire.
Although his forte was War artist, Mikeshin's sketch won the much-publicized contest for the monument to the Millennium of Russia in 1859. Henceforward, commissions were plentiful. He illustrated the official motto Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality in designs for bombastic outdoor statues of Kuzma Minin in Nizhny Novgorod, Alexey Greig in Mykolaiv, and Alexander II of Russia in Rostov-on-Don.
Only a few of Mikeshin's outdoor monuments survived the Soviet years. These include the statues of Catherine the Great in Saint Petersburg (1873), Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Kiev (1888), and Yermak Monument in Novocherkassk (1904). He also won competitions to erect monuments abroad, e.g., the statue of Pedro IV in Lisbon.
The Khmelnytsky monument was at the center of controversy, as the original version would have depicted the 17th-century Cossack leader trampling a Polish people, a Jew, and a Catholic priest under the hooves of the horse. This xenophobic element was removed in the monument as finally erected.
In 1876–1878, Mikeshin was the editor of , a satirical magazine in which he published his and illustrations to the works of Nikolai Gogol and Taras Shevchenko. He died on 31 January 1896 in Saint Petersburg.
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