Verestehagin, VASILII,

Verestehagin, VASILII, painter, was born, 26th October 1842, at Tcherepovets in the government of Novgorod, and studied at the Naval School in St Petersburg, becoming an officer in 1859. He subsequently gave himself to art, and, after a sojourn in Tiflis, became a pupil of Gérôme at Paris. In 1867 he was with Kauffmann in the Turcoman campaigns, the fruits of which he put on canvas in Munich; and he reaped a richer artistic harvest from a visit to India in 1874. Still more famous were his painfully realistic pictures of the horrors of the fightings, plunderings, amputations, and battlefields cumbered with mutilated corpses of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877. In 1884 he made another journey to India, visiting by the way Syria and Palestine; and subsequently produced a series of striking but unconventional pictures of the life of Christ and other sacred themes. He has painted also gigantic pictures of the execution of mutinous sepoys by English soldiers, and of Nihilists by the Russians. He has also given us autobiographical sketches of his travels (trans. 1887), and a book on 1812: Napoleon in Russia (1899). At Home and in War (Eng. trans. New York, 1888) is by his brother Alexander Vasilievitch Verestehagin.