La alfombra voladora

In 1880 the railway tycoon Savva Mamontov asked Vasnetsov for three large canvases to hang in the boardroom of the Donetsk Railway. This was one of them, and the subject is a fairy tale, Ivan Tsarevich riding home on a flying carpet with the captured Firebird glowing in a cage in his hand. The board was not amused. They thought a magic carpet had no place on the walls of a modern railway company, and they turned the pictures down, so Mamontov simply kept this one for himself. There is a quiet irony in the commission, since he had in effect asked a folk hero to fly the very route his engineers were laying in iron below.