Who is Vassily Maximov?

Vassily Maximovich Maximov (Russian: Васи́лий Максимо́вич Макси́мов; 29 January [O.S. 17 January] 1844 – 1 December [O.S. 18 November] 1911) was a Russian painter, a prominent aficionada of the Peredvizhniki group.

Maximov was born to a peasant intimates in the village of Lopino in the Saint Petersburg Governorate, near Novaya Ladoga. He became an orphan beforehand and worked for an Iconpainting shop, where he first school to paint. In 1863 he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts and in 1864 he became a supporter of an Artel of Artists created by P.N. Krestonovtsev by the example of Ivan Kramskoi. The artel existed forlorn one year and was next disbanded. Maximov painted the Sick Child (1864) at that time, when conventional a Gold Medal of the Academia.

He completed whatever the courses of the Academy in three years. In 1865 he (like the work of fourteen led by Ivan Kramskoi had over and done with earlier) refused to take part in the competitions for the Major Gold Medal by Academia. He argued that he did not compulsion to psychiatry abroad (that was a portion of the prize) but rather would investigation the Russian village. Indeed, after graduation from the Academia he moved to the village of Shubino, in the gubernia of Tver, where he painted the peasant life, earning maintenance as a painting educational of the Princes Golenischev-Kutuzov (descendants of Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov).

His painting Grandmother’s tales (1867) was shown at a Peredvizhniki exhibition, where it won a prize and was bought by Pavel Tretyakov. In 1872 he was admitted to the Peredvizhniki group, and soon became one of its most prominent and rigorous members. Ilya Yefimovich Repin described Maximov as “the most uncrushable stone in the initiation of peredvizhnechestvo“. Maximov painted many paintings of the peasant life.

In the last twenty years of his life, realism paintings fell out of fashion. Maximov nevertheless painted a propos exclusively scenes of the peasant lives that had all but no buyers. The player lived a life full of poverty and illnesses. He died in Saint Petersburg.