Fyodor Vasilyev

Fyodor Vasilyev was 23 when he died, and he had been famous in Russian art circles for only a few years, admired as a kind of boy genius of landscape. He came up fast in St Petersburg in the late 1860s, close to the painters Ivan Kramskoi and Ivan Shishkin, the leading realists of the day, and his early canvas 'The Thaw', a bleak view of melting spring roads, made his name at once.

Then tuberculosis forced him south. The Society for the Encouragement of Artists paid for him to move to Yalta, on the warm Crimean coast, on the understanding that he would repay them in pictures. He was homesick there for the flat, wet, northern countryside he could no longer reach.

His best-known work, 'Wet Meadow', comes from those years: a low Russian field under a huge clouded sky, painted in Crimea from old sketches and memory. He finished it in 1872 and died the next year, in the autumn of 1873.