Vasily Polenov

Vasily Polenov was a Russian landscape painter associated with the Peredvizhniki movement of realist artists. He studied under Pavel Chistyakov and in the Imperial Academy of Arts . As a pensioner of the Academy he traveled to Germany, Italy, France, painted historical and genre pictures and portraits. But most attractive for him was landscape painting on plein air. He studied the works of French landscape painters, especially those by the Barbizon school. Polenov concentrated on painting landscapes in the realist tradition of Aleksey Savrasov and Fyodor Vasilyev. He attempted to impart the silent poetry of Russian nature, related to daily human life. Polenov was the first to introduce the principles of ‘European influence’ in Russia, these were the basics of plein air painting: clean and bright colors, colored shadows, free strokes and freshness of color combined with artistic finish of composition. His work had a great impact on further development of Russian landscape painting.