Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov was a Russian artist who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. He is considered a key figure of the revivalist movement in Russian art.Viktor Vasnetsov was born in a remote village Lopyal of Vyatka guberniya in 1848. His father Mikhail Vasilievich Vasnetsov, a village priest, was a well-educated 'philosophy-inclined' man interested in natural science, astronomy and painting. His grandfather was an icon painter. Two of his three sons, Viktor and Apollinary, became remarkable painters, the third one becoming a schoolteacher. Recalling his childhood in a letter to Vladimir Stasov, Vasnetsov remarked that he "had lived with peasant children and liked them not as a narodnik but as a friend".