Vassili Perov (1833-1882)

Vassili Perov was born in Tobolsk in 1833. His farther, the baron Grigori Kriedener, was a widely-educated person, and being the governor would get in contacts with the exiled Decembrists.

Perov was an illegitimate child, so at his early childhood he was registered as Vassiliev after his god-farther, and later due to his inclination to calligraphy was called Perov (the name ‘Perov’ originates from the word ‘a feather pen’). After a year Vassili was born, the family moved to Arkhangelsk, and later to Arzamass.

Perov got his artistic education at the Arzamass arts school (1846-1849), and later at the Moscow college for fine arts and sculpture (1853-1862). Even his early paintings demonstrated his attachment to the ideas of humanism and improving the human life. Those ideas were shared by the most advanced people of the Russian society. In 1860 his famous paintings came to life: ‘A Countryside Procession at the Easter’ and ‘A Village Sermon’, where Perov outlined social and moral contradictions of contemporary life with utmost vigour and bitter sarcasm. Artistic heritage of Perov is very close to the moral ideas depicted by the classics of the Russian literature F. Dostoyevski and A. Ostrovski. It is not by chance that their portraits painted by Perov reveal the innermost nature of the writers.

V. Perov was considered the central figure in the Russian painting of the second half of the XIXth century. He was a founder of the Association of Peredvizhniks (transient painters), and acted as a talented teacher and a writer.