Vladimir Makovsky made his first genre work, Boy selling kvass, at the age of 15. After graduating from the art school in 1866 with a silver medal, he received the title of Artist of the third degree. Very soon, in 1869 he was awarded the first degree for his work Peasant boys guarding horses. Shortly afterwards, Makovsky joined the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions and soon was elected a member of the Board of the Association. And in 1873 he was awarded the title of Academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts for his painting Nightingale Lovers.

While his brother Konstantin was a so called “salon artist”, most of Vladimir Makovsky’s works are linked with people from the lower classes of society. There’s nothing idyllic about the subjects he had been looking for in overnight stays and flea markets. “He visits all the almshouses… He knows all the outskirts of Moscow, all the slums, you”ll meet him at flea markets and folk festivals, at every ball, theater showing, concert, masquerade, on the boulevard”, wrote the critic Nikolai Alexandrov in his “Art Journal” about Vladimir Makovsky.

Vladimir Makovsky portrayals of peasants, drunkards, retired soldiers, the sick and the poor, were so credible, so true-to-life, that critics would later coin a new term to describe his style — Russian Critical Realism. Another example of this genre is the painting Lodging Home that depicts a drunken man dressed in rags, who is the founder of the genre of Russian romantic landscape, the author of the painting Rooks have arrived, artist Alexei Savrasov.

Vladimir Makovsky’s talent in depicting common folk was supplemented by extraordinary productivity. During his sixty-year career in art, he created more than one and a half thousand canvases, that are now housed in major museums in Russia and around the world.