THE PAINTER PROVOCATEUR

Vasily Vereshchagin was groomed, from nearly the time he was born in 1842, to be an officer in the Russian military. When he was eight years old his well-to-do parents sent him to the Alexander Cadet Corps, a military school at Tsarskoye Selo, south of St. Petersburg, and three years later he entered the Sea Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg. Some 15 years later he would graduate from the naval school first in his class, but he no longer saw a life for himself in the military. He wanted to be an artist.

Vereshchagin enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, and in 1864 he went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme, the famous French painter and sculptor.

His first taste of war came in 1868, when, at age 26, he was invited to accompany the Russian army under General Konstantin von Kaufman to Turkestan (now Uzbekistan),