Brief Biography-Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin was an internationally renowned Russian war artist, the Apotheosis of War being his most famous painting. He was born in the village of Liubets in Cherepovets. His mother was a Tarter, and his father was a wealthy landowner who intended him for the navy; however, he wanted nothing from a very young age but to paint. He entered the Saint Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1864 he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme. After that, he travelled through the east, painting and sketching with the Russian army. On receiving his inheritance in 1871, he went to Munich, where he painted his scenes from the Caucasus and Turkestan; he exhibited them in Saint Petersburg in 1874. Next, he went to India and ascended the Himalayas. When he returned to Paris, he painted his accounts of the British in India, and the Hindoos Blown from Cannons became very controversial. In 1877, he went to Turkestan and painted scenes from the Russo-Turkish war, which he exhibited in Kensington, Vienna, Berlin, and Saint Petersburg to much acclaim. He painted religious subjects when he visited Syria and Palestine in 1884; the clergy lambasted these pictures due to their apparent reality. In Moscow in 1893, he produced his images of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. His guises of Napoleon as a savage did not entirely impress the critics in Paris. After visiting China, where he portrayed Japanese conflicts, he painted Admiral Alexeieff at Port Arthur, where he died on board the Petropavlouvsk with Admiral Makaroff as it sank in 1904.