19.10.1854 – 08.10.1917

Sergei Ivanovich Vasilkovsky – a bright representative of the Ukrainian national school of painting, which continued the traditions of the Wanderers.

He was born in the city of Izyum of the Kharkov province to the clerk’s family. The first skills in the visual arts, Sergei received in the Kharkov gymnasium, his teacher was Dmitry Bezperchy – a former serf, a student of Taras Shevchenko in the workshop of Karl Bryullov. After training in the gymnasium, at the request of his father, Vasilkovsky entered the Kharkov Veterinary School, where his studies were interrupted in 1873 due to financial difficulties.

From 1876 to 1885, Sergei Vasilkovsky studied at the Petersburg Academy of Arts in the landscape class at M.K. Klodt and V.D. Orlovsky. In 1883, traveling around Ukraine, Vasilkovsky created a number of famous landscapes, which allowed him to take part in the contest for a gold medal and in the All-Russian academic exhibition. For landscape sketches, in which he conveyed the picturesqueness of Ukrainian nature, Vasilkovsky received 5 silver and one small gold medal, and for the painting “On the Donets” (not preserved) – a large gold medal and the right to a foreign trip for professional perfection.

In March 1886 Vasilkovsky went abroad. Traveled to England, France, Spain, Italy, South Africa and Germany. There he got acquainted with the collections of art museums, perfected his skills, guided by the advice of V. Orlovsky and I. Pohitonov, who lived at that time in Paris, worked hard and exhibited his works in the Paris Salon.

Stay abroad has increased the desire to direct his talents to the development of the landscape genre. Vasilkovsky walked on foot along the Kharkiv and Poltava provinces, descending the Dnieper to Zaporozhye. During the travels he drew forests and meadows, rural huts and streets at different times of the year, with simple genre motifs that fit organically into nature – avoiding simplification, deepening the structure of images.

Highly appreciating creative independence, Vasilkovsky did not associate himself with membership in any associations and represented his works at exhibitions of various associations of Petersburg, Kharkov, and Kiev (the first personal exhibition of the artist was held in Kharkov in 1900).

Sergei Vasilkovsky left almost 3000 works, before his death, transferring half of them to the Kharkov Art Museum. Most of them died during the Great Patriotic War, and now in museums and private collections there are about 500 of his works.

In the collection of the Voronezh Regional Art Museum. I.N. Kramskoy stored several works of the artist. Among them, the work “At the fence”, which is a variant-repetition of the painting “Cossack and the Little Girl” (1894), located in the Kharkov State Museum of Fine Arts.