Vasily Yakovlevich Grachyov was a Russian sculptor. He was born into a family of state peasants. He received primary artistic education in Saint Petersburg, studying under the court chaser Andreyev for six years. He also worked for silversmiths Verkhovtsev, Safronov and Sazikov. He collaborated with the foundries of Smirnov, Woerffel, Ovchinnikov and Khlebnikov.
Russian sculptors of the second half of the 19th century mainly worked with indoor sculpture (such as portraits and genre compositions). The genre sculpture became synonymous with Realism; it was characterized by a striving for verisimilitude, emotional facial expressions, and a penchant for detail.
Bronze indoor sculptures seemed to be designed to meet the needs of the developing genre. They were distinguished by their high-quality artistic casting and unconventional compositions, which now included elements of the environment — vegetation, stones, elements of architecture — to complement the idea of the work.
In the 1860s–1880s, Russian sculptors began actively using the patination technique along with electroplating when working with bronze, inspired by the aesthetics of French sculpture. A dense layer of patina with smooth combinations of halftones created the necessary perception of shadows and overtones, which made the image more expressive and complete. Patina coating could be greenish or brown.
Vasily Grachyov is often called a virtuoso of varied reproduction. Grachyov’s sculptural composition “A Circassian Man with a Young Circassian Woman, Descending from the Mountains on Horseback” is a variation of Yevgeny Lanceray’s work “Line Cossack with a Young Cossack Woman, Both on Horseback”. Vasily Grachyov relocated the characters to a later time and changed the motif: the characters were no longer Cossacks but Circassians — representatives of one of the ethnic groups in the North Caucasus. The sculptor accurately conveyed the ethnographic details, creating lyrical images of two Circassians wearing national clothes and depicting a horse that treads carefully along a steep mountain path.
