Viktor Vasnetsov was born in the remote village of Lopyal in Vyatka Governorate in 1848, the second of the seven children (his only sister died 4 months after her birth).

[3][4] His father Mikhail Vasilievich Vasnetsov (1823–1870), known to be philosophically inclined, was a member of the priesthood,[1] and a scholar of the natural sciences and astronomy.

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".

[3] From the age of ten, Viktor studied in a seminary in Vyatka, each summer moving with his family to a rich merchant village of Ryabovo.

He also helped an exiled Polish artist, Michał Elwiro Andriolli, to execute frescoes for Vyatka's Alexander Nevsky cathedral.

It was in Paris that he became fascinated with fairy-tale subjects, starting to work on Ivan Tsarevich Riding a Grey Wolf and The Firebird.

In the late 1870s Vasnetsov concentrated on illustrating Russian fairy tales and the epic narrative poem Bylinas, executing some of his best known pieces: The Knight at the Crossroads (1878), Prince Igor's Battlefield (1878), Three princesses of the Underground Kingdom (completed 1884 ), The Flying Carpet (1880), and Alionushka (1881).

The vogue for Vasnetsov's paintings would spread in the 1880s, when he turned to religious subjects and executed a series of icons for Abramtsevo estate of his patron Savva Mamontov.

The influential art critic Vladimir Stasov labelled them a sacrilegious play with religious feelings of the Russian people.

Another popular critic, Dmitry Filosofov, referred to these frescoes as "the first bridge over 200 years-old gulf separating different classes of Russian society".

It was in Kyiv that Vasnetsov finally finished Ivan Tsarevich Riding a Grey Wolf and started his most famous painting, the Bogatyrs.

After the October Revolution he advocated removing some of the religious paintings (notably those by Alexander Ivanov) from churches to the Tretyakov Gallery.

Vasnetsov is credited with the creation of the budenovka (initially named bogatyrka), a military hat reproducing the style of Kievan Rus' cone-shaped helmets.