Each person has his own destiny. Someone lives a very long life, and after death they quickly forget about him. And someone, living a very short time, leaves a mark on the earth, which they will talk about, remember, admire. It so happened that history knows two people named Fedor Vasilyev. Each of them has its own life story and its own heritage. This will be interesting to learn from the article.
Young talent
In February 1850, Fedor Alexandrovich Vasiliev was born in the family of a small official in Gatchina on February 22. It so happened that the family moved with his eldest daughter and one-year-old Fedor to St. Petersburg. The boy’s childhood passed in desperate need on Vasilyevsky Island. Fyodor and his older sister (1847) were born out of the church marriage of their parents, and two younger brothers were born after the parental wedding in the church.
The talent of Fedor Vasiliev was revealed in early childhood, when he began to draw pictures from magazines. He studied at the gymnasium for free - this is a merit of the fact that he sang loudly in the church choir. After the death of his father, in fact, the head of the family becomes 15-year-old Fedor, on whose shoulders lay concern for the family. In order to somehow earn a living, the young man goes as a student to Peter Sokolov, who worked at the Academy of Arts as a restorer, and in the evenings he studies at a drawing school.
First acquaintances with artists
Acquaintance with I. I. Shishkin, a recognized master of painting, then with I. N. Kramsky, who later became friends, occurred in a drawing school, where they taught. In 1863, the young artist Fyodor Vasilyev came to the Artel of Artists, led by Kramskoy. Communication and friendship with artists at the Artel have become the main professional universities in life for young men. By the age of eighteen, Fedor had every reason to call himself a landscape painter. The main role in his choice of artistic direction was played by I. I. Shishkin, the largest landscape painter of that time.
Thanks to his studies with Shishkin, Fedor learned to distinguish between various forms of nature, to capture the design of trees and leaves. Shishkin instilled in his student a love of observation. The early landscapes of Vasiliev contain a lot of "Shishkinsky".
At the suggestion of I.I. Shishkin, Fedor goes with him to Valaam for studies. At an exhibition in the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, after returning from sketches, Vasiliev's works were displayed along with Shishkin's works. The work of Fedor Vasilyev "On the island of Valaam. Stones" was acquired by a major philanthropist Count Stroganov. Later he followed the success of the seventeen-year-old artist and was his patron. Thanks to the first mature works, Vasiliev’s name entered the Petersburg art life.
Becoming an artist
His mature work - "Village Street", "The Return of the Herd" - wrote Vasilyev in 1868. The painting "The Return of the Herd" received the first prize at the competition of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. The summer and autumn of 1869, at the invitation of Count Stroganov, the artist spends in the village of Znamenskoye, Tambov Region, where he absorbed the vastness of the steppe and the height of the immense sky. Moving the same autumn to Hoten near Sumy in Ukraine, to another estate of the count, he saw a different nature - oaks in three girths that appear in his sketches.
For the first time looking at the paintings of the artist Fyodor Vasilyev in his workshop, Repin was embarrassed, not expecting to see such mature works by a twenty-year-old artist. According to Repin's stories, this young man had a style of painting with such compositional decisions that did not occur to him, Repin, who graduated from the Academy of Arts.
last years of life
A man gradually enters the landscape painter’s paintings as a lyrical image. The work "Volga lagoons" remained an unfinished painting, which attracted everyone's attention at the exhibition of the artist's latest paintings. The painting was acquired by P. M. Tretyakov, as well as a number of other paintings from the artist’s heritage, such as “Morning” and “Abandoned Mill”.
The life of a young gifted artist turned out to be tragically short. An unexpected disease - tuberculosis - overtook him at such a young age. Doctors categorically forbade living in the humid climate of St. Petersburg. The inevitability of moving to Crimea was not discussed. At first, Fedor worked, but the disease did not recede. Fyodor Vasilyev died on September 24, 1873 in Yalta, where he was buried.
Both the artist’s contemporaries and researchers of his works admit that this talented person could contribute his vision to landscape painting, but early death did not allow it. His legacy is paintings of nature painted by the soul.
