Oil painting Portrait of a soldier Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov

№Verns 71


*** ABOUT THIS PAINTING ***
* TITLE: "Portrait of a soldier"
* ARTISTS: Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov
* SIZE: 38x47 cm/'14.96x18.50 inches'
* MEDIUM: oil, canvas
* HAND PAINTED: Original painting from our collection
* CONDITION: we tried to convey the maximum information with the help of photos about this product

About the artist: Born on September 5, 1874 at the Mshinskaya station at the time of the Warsaw Railway, 109 km from St. Petersburg, where his father served as an assistant to the station chief. When the boy was five years old, his mother died, and his father was transferred to work in St. Petersburg. Vladimir was assigned to a commercial school, but it was not possible to finish it due to the death of his father. Passed exams as an external student at the gymnasium of the Imperial Philanthropic Society.

From an early age, the boy's favorite pastime was drawing, but he began to study painting only at the age of 24, attending evening classes in the preparatory class of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts from 1898. The teachers at that time were A. Pisemsky, A. Afanasiev, J. Tsionglinsky, V. Navozov; the director of the school was Yevgeny Sabaneev.

In 1901 he entered the Higher Art School at the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he was the first of 180 applicants. Following the example of friends in the studio of I.E. Repin, he soon became disillusioned with his pedagogical activity and moved to the studio of V.E.Makovsky. In the second year of study, Professor I. Tvorozhnikov recommended V.A.Kuznetsov to the artist K. Zimin as an assistant for painting the walls in the church of the Nizhne-Saldinsky plant in the Urals, and in the summer of 1902 he ended up in Nizhnyaya Salda as a senior group of artists for painting the church of Alexander Nevsky. From that time on, the professors of the Academy began to invite VA Kuznetsov to work on the murals, including the painting of the Cathedral in Sofia [2].

Painting the church in Nizhnyaya Salda, V.A.Kuznetsov studied the basics of monumental painting, but he was more attracted by wooden buildings, folk objects and the stern faces of the inhabitants of the Urals, with which he filled out his albums. He studied the life of the Old Believers, and in 1903 he married the daughter of the head of a large Old Believer family. Since then, the artist's frequent trips from St. Petersburg to the Urals began, where his family lived - his wife and children: son Boris (born 1904) and daughter Galina (born 1905) In 1904, on one of his trips to the Urals , in the Nizhne-Salda plant the artist paints a small genre painting "Grandfather and Granddaughter", which was sold at an exhibition at the Academy of Arts. This was the artist's first performance with a finished painting. It marked the beginning of his constant artistic activity as an artist.