The small shoulder-length portrait of a young man of ruddy complexion, painted by Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov, entered the Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts under the title “The Wrestler’s Head”. For a long time, the identity of the model remained unknown. Only in 2009, the employees of the Odessa Fine Arts Museum revealed that it was Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov, a Russian artist and a member of the Wanderers.

The study features a healthy, strong man with magnificent hair, a thick mustache, and bushy eyebrows depicted against a dark blue background. The man’s direct and attentive look speaks of his frankness and honesty and reveals his strong and uncompromising nature. Because of his charismatic appearance, Nikolai Kuznetsov was portrayed by many artists, including Karl Bryullov, Osip Braz, Konstantin Korovin, and Ilya Repin. He was even depicted in Repin’s “Cossacks are Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan” as a Cossack with a bandaged forehead and sat for his other painting “Saint Nicholas of Myra Saves Three Innocents from Death”.

Nikolai Kuznetsov was born into the family of a wealthy landowner in the Kherson Governorate in 1850. As a young man, he became fascinated by the ideas of “traveling art exhibitions” and took up drawing. However, it was a happy coincidence that helped him become an artist. He went to St. Petersburg to join the Life-Guards Lancer Regiment but was not received in audience by the commander and unexpectedly entered the Imperial Academy of Arts. Two years later, having already been awarded three silver medals, he gave up his studies convinced by Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy and Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin. In 1881, Kuznetsov started exhibiting his works and in 1883, became a member of the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions. As a true art enthusiast, he collected a large art gallery, including works by foreign artists, and in 1887, became one of the organizers of the Society of South Russian Artists. Tall and sturdy, he often showed off his strength, easily lifting several people at once. In 1889, while holding two people on his shoulders, Nikolai Kuznetsov lifted a stone idol weighing over half a ton and suffered a sprain. After that, he walked with crutches for many years.

Nikolai Kuznetsov’s lifetime project was the art gallery in Odessa which was constructed in 1900. It housed paintings by many leading Russian artists. After the Russian Revolution, in 1920, the artist emigrated to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, where he died nine years later. His oeuvre includes the 1891 portrait of Viktor Vasnetsov holding a painter’s palette.