Vasily Perov

Vasily Perov was a Russian painter and one of the founding members of Peredvizhniki, a group of Russian realist painters. He lived at a time when an artist’s indifference to social problems was considered immoral. His pictures carried strong social implication and thus became an important landmark in the history of Russian painting. The mature foreman of a household genre and deep psychologist, Perov acts in a line of cases both as sophisticated painter and as the author of outstanding portraits. Exploring life, he discovered a variety of interesting characters and was able to convey their individuality. Perov created a series of portraits of the Russian people of culture. Only an artist who fully understood the task of portraiture could have achieved this characterization, passionate and devoid of everything vain and conditional. In his portraits we see a brilliant combination of a faithful and, at the same time, critical rendering and a profound explanation of character.