Vasily V. Vereshchagin (1842–1904): Vae victis in Asia and in Europe

Abstract

Vasily Vereshchagin (1842–1904) was one of the most well-known Russian artists of the second half of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Strongly influenced by the popular French Neo-Classicist and Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérome, Vereshchagin's was constantly in pursuit of new subjects for his art. Instead of construing the east as a place of backwardness, lawlessness or barbarism, enlightened and tamed by Occidental rule, Vereshchagin's engagement with progress and humanism evolved in the course of his numerous expeditions and travels, shaping themes and images of human pathos, uncontrollable force and emotional extremes engendered by the war violence unfolding before his eyes. This article will trace Vereshchagin's life and works and their place in the development of the arts in the nineteenth century, when genre painting, the prevalent form of Orientalist art, gradually evolved into battle scenes. Vereshchagin selected the facts of human existence to transfer them to his drafts and studies as if he were attempting to discover the roots of cultural contradictions between the beauty and diversity of human creativity and the poverty, cruelty and barbarity of human life. His method of juxtaposing the traditional form of battle painting and the real tragedy of war whose victims had neither voice nor identity would challenge generals, tsars, governments and the orthodoxies of his time but would also bring him fame and respect.