Education
He studied at the Saint St. Petersburg Academy of Arts (1849–1861) under Pyotr Basin.
He studied at the Saint St. Petersburg Academy of Arts (1849–1861) under Pyotr Basin.
He was a pensioner of the Academy of Arts in Paris and in Rome (1862–1870). He taught in the Drawing School of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (1860–1864), and in Saint St. Petersburg (from 1872) he was the professor-head of workshop (1908–1910) and managing mosaic branch (1890–1912). The art-pedagogical system of Chistyakov, whose students included Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Polenov, Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov, and Vasily Surikov, developed in constant struggle against the inert system of academism and played a huge role in the development of realism in Russian art of the second half of the 19th century.
The main goal of Chistyakov was the preparation of the artist-citizen possessing high professional skill.
His pedagogical method assumed the merger of the direct perception of nature by the artist with its scientific study. In creative practice he aspired to dramatization of a historical plot and psychological saturation in historical and genre portraits (Head of a Ciucciara, 1864, in the Russian Museum, Saint St. Petersburg.
Boyar, 1876, in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).