Vladimir Vasilievich PEREPLETCHIKOV

Moscow 1863 - Moscow 1918

Biography



A landscape painter and draughtsman, Vasily Perepletchikov was a pupil of Alexander Kiselev at the School of Fine Arts in Moscow and Vasily Polenov at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. A founding member of the conservative Union of Russian Artists in 1903, Perepletchikov exhibited with the group in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere, and his work was dominated by lyrical Russian landscapes painted in an Impressionist vein and characterized by a heightened sense of colour. Paintings by Perepletchikov were often illustrated in the leading art magazine Mir iskusstva and were owned by artists such as Isaak Levitan and Sergei Vinogradov. Perepletchikov’s diaries record much of interest in the artistic life of Moscow around the turn of the century, including visits to the homes of the collectors Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, all recorded in a highly opinionated and at times somewhat acidic tone.

When the First World War broke out in August 1914 and Russian men faced compulsory conscription into the army, like many artists and intellectuals Perepletchikov found the situation almost intolerable; as he wrote during this period of crisis, ‘I am no longer a painter. I have almost forgotten how to paint.’ The artist was to spend the last years of his career unable to practice his profession, and died in Moscow shortly before the war ended. Paintings by Vasily Perepletchikov, whose appearance is recorded in a 1912 pastel portrait by Sergei Malyutin, are today in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and elsewhere.