Виктор Васнецов

In 1884 the authorities in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire and now the capital of Ukraine, hired Viktor Vasnetsov to fresco the newly built St Vladimir's Cathedral, a job that took him five years and nearly 400 preparatory sketches to finish. He was already known for scenes of fairy tales and medieval warriors, not church painting, and critics were unsure what to expect.

What he delivered broke with convention. Instead of the flat, formal icon style used in most Russian churches at the time, Vasnetsov filled the walls with saints and princes rendered with the same folkloric grandeur as his fairy-tale canvases. The influential critic Vladimir Stasov called it a sacrilegious play with religious feeling, while another critic, Dmitry Filosofov, called it the first bridge across a long-standing gulf between Russian high art and popular tradition.

Vasnetsov carried that same monumental folk sensibility into his best-known secular painting, Bogatyrs, finished in 1898, showing three legendary medieval warrior-heroes on horseback guarding the steppe. It hung, and still hangs, in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery.