Heategija

1867–1868 · Formazione

Risovalnaya shkola Imperatorskogo obshchestva pooshchreniya khudozhestv

1867–1868

Ivan Kramskoi: mentor and friend

While attending the drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists he befriended Ivan Kramskoi, leader of the Peredvizhniki, and called him his teacher.

August 1868

Admitted to the Academy of Arts

In August 1868, at the second attempt, he was admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts; the attempt a year earlier had not worked out.

1868–1876

Friendship with Repin and the “evenings” at Antokolsky’s

In St Petersburg he grew very close to Ilya Repin; he attended the “evenings” at the apartment of Repin and the sculptor Mark Antokolsky, where the student Ivan Savenkov read bylinas in a slow chant, in the northern accent so familiar to Vasnetsov — and so his interest in early Russian culture and folk epic finally took shape.

1870

He meets Pavel Chistyakov

Pavel Chistyakov, back from Rome, saw Vasnetsov’s drawing “A Prince’s Icon-painting Workshop” at an Academy exhibition, asked to be introduced to its author and soon made him a regular pupil; Vasnetsov remembered his teacher as “an enemy of the formula” who could show each pupil the road to his own development.

summer 1871

He meets his future wife, Alexandra Ryazantseva

In the summer of 1871, home in Vyatka on academic leave, he met Alexandra Ryazantseva in the local library — a merchant’s daughter who would become one of the first women from Vyatka with a higher medical education; he was struck by “her eyes — stern and extraordinarily kind”.