Cherepovets,
Vologda Oblast 1842-1904 Port Arthur, Japan
Before
he studied in the atelier of J.L. Gerome in Paris (1864-1865), Vasilii
Vasilievich Vereshchagin attended the Petersburg Academy of Arts from
1861 to 1863. A tireless voyager, Vereshchagin journeyed widely
throughout the various regions of Russia, visited nearly every country
in Europe, and traveled to India on two occasions (1874-1876,1882) as
well as to Siberia, Palestine (1884), the United States, and Japan in
the 1890s. As a military artist, Vereshchagin took part in the Turkestan
War (1867-1870), the Russian-Turkish War (1877-1878), and the
Russian-Japanese War (1904). He was killed in the latter war during the
explosion of the Russian flagship "Petropavlovsk." His travels
and ethnographic observations, in addition to his historical sketches
and his participation in military campaigns, were not merely his
artistic passion but also his means of support.
One
of the best known Russian artists of battle scenes, Vereshchagin did
not join the Circle of the Itinerants, even though he shared their
viewpoints on art. Instead, he showed his own works in one-man
exhibitions, grouping his paintings in series, as a rule. Vereshchagin
lived most of his life in Petersburg and Moscow, although he had at
different times studios in Paris and Munich (1871-1873).
In
1876, soon after the initial exhibition of a large series of works by
Vereshchagin, artist I. N. Kramskoi responded to the numerous arguments
and discussions the paintings elicited:
"Vereshchagin
is not the kind of artist whose works mainly stir one's heart; rather, I
would say, he is a man who has taken an art form as a conduit for
political, social, and religious ideas and has employed all the devices
capable of affecting the minds of his contemporaries and has used them
in his work brilliantly...'
