30.11.1850 – 1920

165 years is the birthday of the Russian artist Alexei Fedorovich Afanasyev. He was born in the family of a servant of the Highest Imperial Court, and at the age of 18 he also began work at the court, first a stoker, and then a footman. However, in 1872 Afanasiev entered the Academy of Arts as a volunteer, where he would study until 1880.

In 1886, Afanasiev took the certificate of visiting the Academy classes in the Academy and the following year he began to work as a teacher in the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. The artist continued to engage in his own creativity, working primarily in the domestic genre.
At the end of the 1880s, Afanasyev joined the “Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions”, at the exhibitions of the 1876 and 1890s, he presented his genre paintings “Cemetery” and “Before the Feast”.

Along with other painters, Alexei Afanasyev participated in the design of the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in St. Petersburg, which is also called the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood, since it was erected on the site where on March 1, 1881, as a result of the attempt, the Emperor Alexander II was mortally wounded. From 1894 to 1897, according to the artist’s sketches, four exterior mosaics were created in the kokoshniks of the temple and eight mosaics for the interior.

But Alexei Afanasyev is best known not as a painter, but as an illustrator and cartoonist. He worked fruitfully for many years with the magazines Shut, The Shards, Lukomorye, and others. In 1897-1898, in the magazine Shut, Ershov’s fairy-tale “The Little Humpbacked Horse” was printed, illustrated by Aleksey Afanasyev.