Three generations with the Vyshnegradskys

Oskar Wiesel, the painter’s father, was an official for special assignments in the department responsible for the state’s foreign loans. The work was delicate: it needed a trusted man who would travel abroad to negotiate and sign papers. He went to London, Berlin and Amsterdam on such errands more than once.

His superior was the finance minister Ivan Vyshnegradsky, a man of remarkable mathematical gifts who worked out the loan calculations himself. Witte recalled that Vyshnegradsky could read a sheet of a hundred logarithms once and then reproduce them from memory without a mistake.

The sons

The two officials’ sons studied together at university: Alexander Vyshnegradsky, later a major banker, and Emil Wiesel, later an academician. A photograph of the two of them survives from those years.

The grandchildren

The acquaintance carried into the next generation. Ivan Vyshnegradsky became a composer and one of the pioneers of quarter-tone music; after the revolution he lived in France. The painter’s elder daughter Alexandra, an architect and watercolorist, corresponded with him until 1974.

Both photographs come from the archive of Andrei Wiesel. The Wikipedia articles on the Vyshnegradskys had no images at all until these appeared there in 2016.