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1889

The move to Moscow

After rushing to Kazan to his gravely ill father, in September Vrubel went to Moscow to see friends — and stayed for fifteen years; most likely he was drawn there by an infatuation with a circus horsewoman. He settled in Konstantin Korovin’s studio on Dolgorukovskaya Street; a plan for the two of them to work together with Serov came to nothing, as relations with Serov did not work out.

1889

Meeting Savva Mamontov

Korovin introduced Vrubel to the industrialist and patron Savva Mamontov, and in December the artist moved into his house on Sadovaya-Spasskaya Street. Mamontov became his steady patron, though Mamontov’s wife openly called Vrubel “a blasphemer and a drunkard”, and the painter soon moved to a rented flat.

1890

Abramtsevo: a passion for ceramics

Having come to Abramtsevo to bid farewell to his friend A. Mamontov, who died on 20 July aged 22, Vrubel stayed on and fell passionately for ceramics — soon he proudly wrote to his sister that he was running a “factory of tiles and terracotta decorations”. For the first time in his life he was no longer a hanger-on in wealthy households and earned well: stove designs, a majolica chapel over A. Mamontov’s grave, a design for an extension to the Mamontovs’ Moscow house.

10 April 1891

Illustrations for Lermontov’s “Demon”

The jubilee two-volume Lermontov, illustrated by 18 artists of whom Vrubel alone was completely unknown to the public, was passed by the censor on 10 April 1891. The press savaged Vrubel’s black-watercolour sheets for their “coarseness, ugliness, caricature and absurdity”, and he became convinced that “true art” is understood by almost no one.

early 1896

Meeting Nadezhda Zabela

In St Petersburg Vrubel stepped in for the ailing Korovin as designer of Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel and Gretel”, which Mamontov was financing, and at a rehearsal he first heard, then saw, the singer of Gretel — Nadezhda Zabela. Rushing up to her in the interval with the cry “What a lovely voice!”, he proposed almost on the day they met, and later told his sister that had she refused, he would have killed himself on the spot.

22 May 1896

The Academy rejects his Nizhny Novgorod panels

Mamontov secured Vrubel a commission for two huge panels for the art section of the All-Russian Exhibition — “Mikula Selyaninovich” and “The Princess of the Dream”, a hundred square metres in three months. But the academician Albert Benois, in charge of the pavilion, demanded sketches, a telegram went to St Petersburg — “Vrubel’s panels are monstrous, they must be removed” — the Academy’s commission ruled them unfit to show, and on 22 May the works were carried out of the pavilion.