Vasily Dmitriyevich Polenov was a painter and teacher. He created history, landscape and genre paintings. Vasily Dmitriyevich Polenov was one of the most talented representatives of the Russian painting school. He worked as a professor at the Academy of Arts, took part in many traveling exhibitions, and taught a whole generation of wonderful artists, among whom were Isaac Levitan, Konstantin Korovin, Abram Arkhipov, Aleksandr Golovin and others. The artist Ilya Semyonovich Ostroukhov said that Vasily Dmitriyevich had revealed “to the Russian artist the secret of a new power of colors and awakened in him the courage of such employment of paint, of which he had not dared to dream before.”

To a wide audience, he is better known as a landscape artist, who painted views of Central Russian and eastern nature that amaze with their immediacy of impression, purity and vibrancy of colors.

The main works of Vasily Dmitriyevich include “A Moscow Courtyard”, “Grandmother’s Garden”, “Summer”, “Overgrown Pond”, “The Ill Woman”, “Christ and the Sinner”, “Golden Autumn”, “Among the Teachers”, and “Received Wisdom.”

“Head of a Young Jew” is a sketch for the painting “Christ and the Sinner”. In 1881, Polenov began working directly on the painting. Following the French scientist and philosopher Ernest Renan, who believed Christ to be real and entirely human, the artist noted that it was necessary “even in art to convey this living image as it really was.” To recreate the historical context in which the events related to the life and work of Christ took place, Polenov took a trip to Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, stopping in Greece on the way. It should be noted that the canvas “Christ and the Sinner” (which Polenov himself saw as the central work in his career) in the history of Russian painting played a more modest role than the sketches for this painting.