Vasili Vasilyevich Vereshchagin
(1842 - 1904) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Vasili Vasilyevich Vereshchagin |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Cherepovets, Russia |
| Nationality: |
Russian |
| Birth: |
1842 |
| Death: |
1904 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
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| Medium: |
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| Style: |
Realist |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
He was born at Cherepovets on October 26, 1842. His father was a Russian landowner of noble birth. When he was eight years old he was sent to Tsarskoe Selo to enter the Alexander cadet corps, and three years later he entered the naval school at St Petersburg, making his first voyage in 1858. He served on the frigate Kamchatka, sailing to Denmark, France and Egypt.
He graduated first in the list from the naval school, but left the service immediately to begin the study of drawing. He won a medal two years later, in 1863, from the St Petersburg Academy for his Ulysses slaying the Suitors. In 1864 he proceeded to Paris, where he studied under Gerome.
In the Salon of 1866 he exhibited a drawing of Dukhobors chanting their Psalms, and in the next year he accompanied General Kaufman's expedition to Turkestan, his military service at the siege of Samarkand procuring for him the cross of St George. He was an indefatigable traveller in Turkestan in 1869, the Himalayas, India and Tibet in 1873, and again in India in 1884.
He exhibited some of his Turkestan pictures in St Petersburg in 1874, among them, two, which were afterward suppressed.
Vereshchagin was with the Russian army during the Turkish campaign of 1877. At the conclusion of the war he acted as secretary to General Skobelev at San Stefano.
After the war he settled at Munich, where he produced his war pictures. The horrors of war attracted a large section of the public not usually interested in art to the series of exhibitions of his pictures in Paris in 1881 and subsequently in London, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna and other cities.
He aroused much controversy by his series of three pictures of a Roman execution. His picture Blowing from Guns in British India depicted executions carried out by tying victims to the barrels of guns. Because of its photographic style, the painting appeared to present itself as impartial record of a real event. A journey in Syria and Palestine in 1884 furnished him with an equally discussed set of subjects from the New Testament. Vereshchagin's paintings caused controversy over portraying the figure of Christ with what was thought at the time to be an unseemly realism. His depiction of Jesus's features was thought of as excessively vulgar and over-emphatically Semitic in ethnicity.
The "1812" series on Napoleon's Russian campaign, on which he also wrote a book, seem to have been inspired by Tolstoi's War and Peace, and were painted in 1893 at Moscow, where the artist eventually settled. |
Samples of Work
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