Viktor Vasnetsov

Viktor Vasnetsov painted Russia’s legends. Knights on huge horses, fairy tale heroes and wistful folk figures appear in his canvases against dark forests and open steppe, and his style became the model for how Russian folklore looks in pictures.

He was born in the Vyatka region and studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. He began with realist scenes of everyday life, then turned to epic and fairy tale subjects. A Knight at the Crossroads (1878) and Alyonushka (1881), a girl sitting alone by a pond, are among his best known works, along with Bogatyrs, the three heroic knights. He also painted frescoes for St Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kyiv and designed the façade of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, where many of his major works hang.

Look at how much atmosphere he gets from landscape: the gloomy sky and scattered bones behind the knight say as much as the rider does.