Fiodor Aleksandrovich Vasilyev Biography

Vasilyev was born in Gatchina in the St. Peterburg province in 1850. Died in Yalta in 1873.
Vasilyev's contemporaries called him “the brilliant youth.” In 1865–1868, Fyodor Vasiliev studied at the School of Graphic Art of the Society for the Promotion of the Arts, and also in the Artists’ Artel under the guidance of I.I. Shishkin.

The influence of the Düsseldorf school is apparent in earlier Vasilyev paintings, but he called the School of Barbizon his teachers. By the beginning of the 1870s, Vasilyev was already a mature master whose paintings imparted new features to the national realistic landscape. His contemporaries said that he had impregnated the Russian landscape with “poetry in a natural rendition.” However, Vasilyev was destined to live a very short life—only 23 years. To some extent, the foreboding of his own tragic fate was reflected in Vasiliev’s creative legacy. Having contracted tuberculosis in 1871, Vasilyev moved to the Crimea where he continued to work to the end.