“Great Artists” - a collection about outstanding masters of painting. The book series contains more than 50 illustrations, an “exquisitely written” biography of the artist and the history of the creation of the paintings. The album is dedicated to the work of Perov.

As one of the founders of critical realism in art, Vasily Grigorievich Perov (1833 (1834) -1882) had a huge influence on the domestic school of painting, enriching it with his unforgettable genre compositions and subtle psychological portraits . The artist was always sensitive to all social phenomena occurring in the country and, with the power of his talent, tried to reveal their true essence. Largely thanks to Perov, Russian realism was saturated with the inspired thought of man, pain for him and high citizenship. Perov’s early works are imbued with an anecdotally “accusatory” mood, presenting picturesque caricatures (“Rural religious procession at Easter”, “Sermon in the village”, “Tea party in Mytishchi”). The master carefully describes the characters and settings, striving for a moralizing effect. The satirical mood, however, weakens over the years, giving way to dramatic expression or good-natured humor. Perov’s coloring acquired a new, sharper, tonal expressiveness in such films as “Seeing Off the Dead Man” and “Troika. Apprentice artisans are carrying water”: a peasant funeral in the first case and an episode from the life of disadvantaged children-apprentices in the second appear not just as social satire, but as a drama about the “humiliated and insulted”, in its sense universal. The power of symbolic-psychological generalization - and accordingly parallels with the prose of F. M. Dostoevsky are even more significant in “The Drowned Woman” and especially in the film “The Last Tavern at the Outpost.” The foggy morning city behind the figure of a suicidal woman and the sunset fading outside the city limits seem like a fatal frontier, giving the gray and low-lying everyday environment a semblance of earthly hell. Perov also made a great contribution to the art of portraiture. He created images of a number of famous cultural figures (“A. N. Ostrovsky”, “V. I. Dal”, “M. P. Pogodin”). His portrait of F. M. Dostoevsky is considered the best pictorial depiction of the writer. Perov’s characters, including the peasant “Fomushka the Sych” or the merchant I. S. Kamynin, are full of special internal significance, regardless of their social and cultural status; their bright individuality is sometimes combined with unprecedented (for the Russian portrait tradition of those years) by the intensity of spiritual life, sometimes on the verge of painful tragedy (as in the portrait of F. M. Dostoevsky). Against this background, genre compositions (“Birders”, “Hunters at Rest”, “Fisherman”) seem to provide a gentle humorous release. Contemplating ordinary people with their by no means heroic, but still “human” soul, Perov here - if we talk about literary parallels - is approaching N. S. Leskov. In the late period, the master strives to create grandiose, generalizing images of national history. However, Perov’s completed historical paintings (“Pugachev’s Court”, “Nikita Pustosvyat. Dispute about Faith”) are not among his masterpieces. Most of the most famous paintings by V. G. Perov can be seen in the Tretyakov Gallery.