Vasilii Nikolaevich Baksheev

Born Dec. 12 (24), 1862, in Moscow; died there Sept. 28, 1958. Soviet painter. People’s Artist of the USSR (1956). Member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR (1947).

Baksheev studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1877 to 1888 under V. E. Makovskii, A. K. Savrasov, V. D. Polenov, and others. In 1896 he became a member of the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions and in 1922, a member of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. Baksheev’s first works were genre paintings in the style of the late period of the traveling art movement, as for example, The Prose of Ordinary Life (1892–93, Tret’iakov Gallery). In the early l?00’s he turned to landscapes, which included such paintings as First Green (1900) and Autumn: Parting Rays (1915), both hanging in the Russian Museum in Leningrad. During the Soviet period Baksheev continued the traditions of Russian plein air, lyrical landscape painting with such works as Blue Spring (1930), Road Into the Forest (1935) and Cloudy Morning (1945), all housed in the Tret’iakov Gallery. He taught in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture between 1894 and 1918 and at the Moscow Oblast 1905 Memorial Art School between 1940 and 1958. A recipient of the State Prize of the USSR in 1943, Baksheev was awarded two Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and various medals.