Artistic Education

Vasily Polenov was a tireless traveller, for whom France - and its capital city in particular - would prove the destination closest to his heart: he wrote in a letter of the attractions of “dear jolly Paris and the merry French”. He visited Paris for the first time as a young man in 1867, while his final stay there was in 1911, by which time he had long earned acclaim as an artist. He lived in Paris for three years from 1872 to 1876, as the recipient of a scholarship from the Academy of Fine Arts, and returned there for particular artistic events, such as the 1889 World Fair and the Salon exhibitions of 1895.