Vereshchagin

Vasily Vereshchagin was one of the most famous Russian battle painters and one of the first Russian artists to be widely recognized abroad. The graphic nature of his realist scenes led many of them to never be printed or exhibited. Vereshchagin attended the St. Petersburg Academy and studied in Paris. Devoting his life to travel, he acquired subjects for paintings from on-the-spot impressions in the Caucasus, in the Crimea, along the Danube River, and in Turkistan with the Russian army. In the Balkans during the Russo-Turkish War (in which he was wounded), Vereshchagin was provided with the themes for some of his famous war pictures. He also painted in Syria and in Palestine and between 1885 and 1903 traveled in Russia, the United States, and Japan. He died during the Russo-Japanese War, aboard the flagship of Admiral Makarov.