Vasily Polenov

In 1878 Vasily Polenov exhibited a small, sunlit painting called A Moscow Courtyard, a scruffy yard with a church behind it, children playing, washing hung out, an ordinary summer morning. It looked like almost nothing, and it became one of the most loved Russian pictures of its century, a founding image of Russian open-air landscape.

Polenov had trained in St Petersburg and travelled in Europe and the Middle East, and he carried lighter colour and fresh air into the circle of the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, who had broken from the academy to paint Russian life for a broad public. His grandest ambition was a huge canvas, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, finished in 1887 after journeys to Palestine to get the light and setting right, and Tsar Alexander III bought it off the wall.

He was also a devoted teacher. At the Moscow School of Painting his students included Isaac Levitan and Konstantin Korovin, who carried his feeling for landscape further still. In his later years he built an estate on the Oka River south of Moscow, in a house he designed himself, and opened it to local peasants and schoolchildren as a kind of public museum. It is still a museum today, and the river station near it carries his name.