1842 -1904 · Travel, ethnography and painting against the war

Heroismless battlefields, Asian roads and traveler portraits make Vereshchagin a major witness to the world and modern violence.

Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin, commonly named Vasily Vereshchagin, was born in Cherepovets in 1842 and died in 1904 near Port Arthur. Trained in the corps of naval cadets, he abandoned his career as an officer to study at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg then with Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris. The trip became his method. He accompanied the Russian campaigns in Turkestan, observed cities, deserts, costumes and rites, then transformed his studies into vast series exhibited across Europe. Mullah Rahim and Mullah Kerim belong to this ethnographic perspective: the two religious are represented with precision and dignity, without becoming simple accessories exotics. Vereshchagin also travels through India, the Balkans, Palestine, Northern Russia, the Philippines, the United States and Japan. His direct experience of combat radically changes battle painting. Instead of celebrating the command, it shows the wounded, the dead, the waiting, the cold and the human consequences of war. The Apotheosis of War, pyramid of skulls in front of a destroyed city, bears an ironic dedication to all conquerors past, present and future. This frankness provokes criticism and censorship, but gives his work an international audience. This frankness provokes criticism and censorship, but gives his work an international audience. Writer, ethnographer, traveler and pacifist, he died aboard the battleship Petropavlovsk during the Russo-Japanese War. Its realism combines documentary precision and moral accusation. The "Vasily Vereshchagin" selection notably compares Mullah Rahim and Mullah Kerim. His reading favors atmosphere.

Vereshchagin travels to see with his own eyes: the precision of the witness becomes for him a criticism of violence and easy exoticism.