The artist is Pryanishnikov
In the late 1860s, Pryanishnikov began working on a picture from the history of the Patriotic War of 1812, and in 1874 he completed his famous canvas “in 1812”. He performed several options for this plot, the best (fourth in a row) is located in the Tretyakov Gallery. In the image of Pryanishnikov, the war of 1812 is deprived of an academic art of a raid of deliberate pomp, represented by the war of liberation, folk, struggle for freedom of homeland. A similar look was close. N. Tolstoy “War and Peace”, published in 1868, is just at the time when Pryanishnikov began to work on his picture. And. N. Kramskoy wrote about her admiringly and. E. Repin: “Pryanishnikov wrote a good thing – "Captive French in 1812"””.
A sketch to the picture demonstrates a conscientious attitude to the artist to study nature, which is necessary to achieve special reliability in the work, the sense of the truth of life in the smallest details. The method of detailed field study of individual images and fragments of a freely composed composition distinguishes Russian painting as a whole for centuries – this is how academic masters created their canvases at the beginning of the 19th century, in the same way many continue to work today.