Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (1842, 1904) was a renowned Russian battle painter.

Vereshchagin graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1867, at the age of 25, he became an artist for the Turkestan Governor-General Kaufman. In the "Yearbook of the Russian Army," it is written about him: "During the eight-day siege of the Samarkand citadel by Bukhara troops, ensign Vereshchagin, by his courageous example, supported the garrison. When on June 3 the enemy approached the gates in large numbers, capturing artillery and occupying all the huts, Vereshchagin, despite the hail of stones and heavy rifle fire, rushed into battle with a rifle in hand, inspiring the defenders of the citadel with his heroism."

A few years later, Vereshchagin traveled through Semirechye and Western China. Among his works dedicated to these places, one can highlight the depiction of a wealthy Kyrgyz hunter with a falcon, views of the mountains near the Lepinskaya stanitsa, the valley of the Chu River, Lake Issyk-Kul, and the snowy peaks of the Kyrgyz ridge.

In Western China at that time, the troops of the Bogd Khan were suppressing the Dungan (Chinese Muslim) uprising in Shaanxi province. Vereshchagin bitterly depicted the destroyed cities. The painting "The Apotheosis of War" was inspired by the story of how the despot of Kashgar, Valikhan-tore, executed a European traveler and ordered his head to be placed on top of a pyramid of the skulls of other executed individuals.

In the 1880s, Vereshchagin traveled to India, where he created a series of paintings known as the "trilogy of executions": "Crucifixion in Roman Times," "Execution by Cannons in British India," and "Execution of Conspirators in Russia."

The painting "The Entry of the Prince of Wales into Jaipur in 1876," housed in the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata, is the largest oil painting in India.

With the onset of the Russo-Japanese War, Vereshchagin went to the front. He died on March 31, 1904, along with Admiral Makarov when the battleship "Petropavlovsk" was blown up by a mine in the outer raid of Port Arthur.