Vassily Dmitrievich Polenov belonged to the progressive Russian intelligentsia of his time. He devoted his whole life to art and education. True to democratic traditions, Polenov sought to make the art he served so selflessly accessible, understandable and useful to ordinary people. Education had long been a tradition in the Polenov family.
The artist’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Nikolai Alexandrovich Lvov, was a brilliantly educated man of wide-ranging interests. A gifted architect, writer, musician, folklore collector and academician, Lvov was an active member of Derzhavin’s circle and a mentor to young artists and writers. “He was full of intelligence and knowledge, loved the sciences and the arts, and was distinguished by refined and elevated taste. People engaged in literature and the arts came to him for advice and often took his judgment as law,” wrote the poet Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin of his friend.
Lvov’s daughter, Vera Nikolaevna, the artist’s grandmother, was keenly attentive to children’s interests and needs and knew folk poetry superbly. Her stories and enchanting fairy tales had a great influence on the childhood interests of her grandchildren, Vassily Dmitrievich and his younger sister Elena Dmitrievna, who later became a gifted watercolorist.
The artist’s great-grandfather on his father’s side, Alexei Yakovlevich Polenov, is known in the history of 18th-century progressive thought as “the first Russian emancipator”. A lawyer educated at the universities of Strasbourg and Göttingen, almost a hundred years before the abolition of serfdom he wrote a dissertation, On the Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, in which he also called for universal literacy in Russia.
His son, Vasily Alexeyevich Polenov, was a writer, a graduate of the Academic Gymnasium, the organizer of the State Archive and head of the main archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and held the title of academician. He had the good fortune to know Alexander Pushkin while the poet was working on his History of Pugachev’s Rebellion. Pushkin’s warm and flattering words about him have survived.
The artist’s father, the noted archaeologist and bibliographer Dmitry Vasilyevich Polenov, served as a young man as secretary of the Russian embassy in Athens. Keenly interested in Hellenic culture, he instilled in his son an ardent love of the art and architecture of ancient Greece, which stayed with him all his life.
Polenov’s mother, Maria Alexeyevna, a portrait painter and children’s writer, created the special atmosphere in the family that shaped the interests of Vassily Polenov and his younger sister from early childhood. Polenov often said later that he had inherited his passionate love of painting from his mother. The educational traditions of the family in which the future artist grew up had a profound and beneficial influence on him.
F. D. Polenov, from the book Polenovo: The V. D. Polenov State Estate Museum. Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1982.
