Georgy Savitsky’s nickname "The Composer" was given to him by his classmates at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg – not because he had a passion for writing music, but for his masterly ability to compose complex scenes with many figures in them. It is hard to believe that his father, the talented artist Konstantin Savitsky, had initially hesitated to take his son into his studio – he was afraid that he might be biased and overestimating his son’s potential. The elder Savitsky was a renowned member of the “Peredvizhniki” (Wanderers) group, a teacher and director of Penza Art College, and also one of the co-painters of "Morning in a Pine Forest"– it is believed that Konstantin Savitsky helped Ivan Shishkin paint the bear cubs, but Tretyakov erased his signature. The son obviously inherited his father's talent. Savitsky gained renown as a master of historical-revolutionary subjects – he was one of the painters of the large-scale panorama "Storming Perekop", commemorating the famous Civil War battle in 1920, but the range of his work is much wider – in his landscapes for example, Savitsky has the lyricism of Isaac Levitan as well as the life-affirming energy of Impressionism.