March 8th, 1924, saw the opening of the Russian Art Exhibition at New York’s Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue. The show included works by some of the biggest names in Russian art from the early 20th century, most of whom had been members of Mir iskusstva and the Union of Russian Artists. The American public had the chance to see Merchant's Wife at Tea, as well as the Portrait of Fyodor Chaliapin by Boris Kustodiev, peasant women by Abram Arkhipov, religious paintings by Vasily Polenov and Mikhail Nesterov, landscapes by Konstantin Korovin, and monasteries by Konstantin Yuon. The exhibition catalogue lists six works by Viktor Vasnestsov, who, together with Polenov, was among the oldest participants. Among them, listed under no.812, is the present painting Young Dreams (fig.1).

The idea of holding an exhibition of contemporary Russian art in America was born a couple of years earlier, with the two chief organisers being the collects or Ivan Troyanovsky and the painter Sergei Vinogradov. The exhibition committee further included Igor Grabar, the director of the Tretyakov Gallery, the publisher Ivan Sytin, and artists Fedor Zakharov and Konstantin Somov. While there certainly was a cultural aspect, the main idea was to raise funds for artists struggling to make a living in post-revolutionary Russia. Vasnetsov was no exception. In late December 1923, he wrote to his son Mikhail: 'I am still working on old paintings (…) I would like to begin a new painting, but I have no canvas and no good paints' (quoted in V.M. Vasnetsov, Pis'ma. Dnevniki. Vospominaniya. Suzhdeniya sovremennikov, Moscow, 1987, p.249). In April the following year, in an autobiographical note, he wrote: 'At the moment, as well as I can, I am finishing off pictures inspired by fairy tales that I have begun a long t.mes ago' (ibid., p.251).

Dated 1918 and 1922, the present work was first shown in public at the 17th Union of Russian Artists' exhibition in January 1923 (fig.2), although it is possible that the idea for the work was conceived much earlier. It often took years for Vasnetsov to bring an idea onto canvas. As a young man, he made a drawing of a knight carrying a pike beside a stone, and in 1876, while in Paris, he made a small sketch of three legendary Russian heroes (Viktor Vasnetsov, Leningrad, 1979, pp.48-49). These sketches would later form the basis for two of his most iconic works, A Knight at the Crossroads (1882, State Russian Museum, although an earlier version was first exhibited in 1878) and The Bogatyrs (1898, State Tretyakov Gallery). Interestingly, the dark-eyed boy with fair skin and hair depicted here resembles the artist’s sons painted decades ago. An oil portrait of Mikhail sitting in a chair dating from 1892 is currently in the collects ion of The National Museum of Belarus, whereas the Vasnetsov House Museum in Moscow has a portrait of Vladimir in a red kaftan similar to the one in the present picture, dated to 1899.

This romantic depiction of a future tsar from an idealised past embodies Vasnetsov’s style and subject matter. During the 1870s in St Petersburg, he had been known primarily as a genre painter who exhibited with the Peredvizhniki. It was only in the old capital Moscow, where Vasnetsov settled in 1878, that he turned to Russian epics and fairy tales as an inspiration for his canvases. In doing so, he developed a particular vision of old Russia and a truly Russian style in painting, moving away from the realism of the Peredvizhniki towards Art Nouveau. His influence on Russian visual culture, not only through his paintings but further through his work as an architect, his association with Abramtsevo, and his position as a key figure in the Russian Revivalist movement, has endured to this day.