Vasily Vasilyevich Vakhrenov was a Russian artist, landscape painter, and illustrator. He was born into an ordinary peasant family in the Vladimir Governorate in 1847. From a young age, he lived and worked in Odessa.

Vakhrenov was enrolled in the Odessa Society of History and Antiquities to become an artist — there he was tracing ancient monuments and numismatic collections. To improve his skills, he attended the drawing school at the Odessa Society of Fine Arts.

In the early 1870s, his drawings were published in the albums “Twenty Views of Odessa”, and later — in “Sixty Views of Odessa”. In 1875, he took part in the art exhibition dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Odessa Society of Fine Arts, where he presented seven of his works — a print and six landscapes.

Vasily Vakhrenov painted “The Portrait of the Sudogda Merchant I.V. Barskov” in 1893.

Sudogda is a small town upon the Sudogda River (a tributary of the Klyazma River) in Vladimir Oblast.

The painting depicts one of the representatives of the Barskov dynasty, whose whole history is connected with Vladimir Oblast and the small town of Sudogda. Philip Barskov, born around 1580, was a resident of the village of Stepachyovo near Vladimir and is considered the founder of the family. During the next 150 years, his direct descendants — the Barskovs from Sudogda — were elevated from peasants to burghers, and some of them even to merchants.

The entire history of this dynasty is closely interwoven with the events of four centuries of Russian history, including the foundation and development of the Anopinsky, Perovsky, and Misheronsky glass factories in the Vladimir Governorate and the glass production in Novgorod Land and the Vyatka region. Noteworthy is the participation of the Barskovs in enlightenment and patronage in what is now Vladimir Oblast — the opening of schools, libraries, bookstores, and hospitals; in the construction of Orthodox and monotheistic churches.

Vakhrenov depicted an elderly merchant Ivan Vasilyevich Barskov. Dmitry Barskov’s book “Our Surname: the History of the Barskov Family Since the 16th Century” states that the merchant Ivan Vasilyevich Barskov died in 1902 at the age of 84 and was buried in an old cemetery in the center of Sudogda.

Vakhrenov depicted the merchant dressed in a smart frock coat, sitting in an expensive English-style armchair. It is worth noting that the artist worked meticulously on all the details of the portrait: a wrinkled face, a gray beard, a blue chair, and an elegant dark woolen frock coat.