Famous Russian Paintings: 10 Masterpieces from Bryullov to Malevich

Karl Bryullov finished The Last Day of Pompeii, an erupting volcano over a fleeing crowd, in 1833. Kazimir Malevich showed Black Square, a black shape on a white ground, in 1915. The other famous Russian paintings in this list fall between those two dates.

The eight in the middle include Ivan Aivazovsky's storm at sea, Ilya Repin's barge haulers and his grief-stricken tsar, and the bears in Ivan Shishkin's misty pine forest. As with other famous paintings from every era, knowing the story behind each one changes what you notice in it.

The ten run in date order. They move from the grand manner of the Imperial Academy, through the realism of the 1870s and 1880s, to the first abstract canvases. To compare other national schools, see the Dutch Golden Age masters and France's best-known canvases.

At a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Collection (October 2026)
1	The Last Day of Pompeii	Karl Bryullov	1833	State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
2	The Ninth Wave	Ivan Aivazovsky	1850	State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
3	The Rooks Have Come Back	Aleksey Savrasov	1871	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
4	Barge Haulers on the Volga	Ilya Repin	1870–1873	State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
5	Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan	Ilya Repin	1885	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
6	Girl with Peaches	Valentin Serov	1887	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
7	Morning in a Pine Forest	Ivan Shishkin (bears by Konstantin Savitsky)	1889	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
8	Bogatyrs	Viktor Vasnetsov	1881–1898	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
9	Composition VII	Wassily Kandinsky	1913	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
10	Black Square	Kazimir Malevich	1915	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The Academy and the sea

01The Last Day of Pompeii, Karl Bryullov (1833)

Bryullov painted the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 on a canvas more than 21 feet wide. He based the scene on the eyewitness letters Pliny the Younger wrote to Tacitus, and on the excavated town itself. The setting is the Road of Tombs, Pompeii's necropolis, seen from the Gate of Hercules. The Russian Museum's entry for the Pompeii canvas traces those sources, and the museum has owned the picture since 1897.

Two of the figures are real people. Bryullov painted himself as the artist on the temple steps, and Countess Yulia Samoilova as the mother holding her daughter. The picture was shown at the Brera in Milan in 1833, at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg in 1834 and at the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1835.

02The Ninth Wave, Ivan Aivazovsky (1850)

In sailors' legend, the ninth wave is the most powerful and destructive of all. In Aivazovsky's storm at dawn, that wave is still bearing down. A handful of survivors cling to a broken mast after a night storm. The sunrise breaking through the spray brings a light of hope into the scene.

Aivazovsky was born in Feodosia, on the Crimean coast, in 1817. His canvas was first acquired for the Imperial Hermitage. In 1897 it became one of the first paintings in the new Russian Museum, which calls it "probably Aivazovsky's most famous and popular work."

Realism and the Wanderers

03The Rooks Have Come Back, Aleksey Savrasov (1871)

Birches full of rooks' nests, wet snow, puddles and a village church make up almost the whole of this small picture. Savrasov went to the Volga in early spring 1871 to recover from the death of his newborn daughter. His first studies were made in the village of Molvitino, near Kostroma, and he finished The Rooks Have Come Back in his Moscow studio.

It hung in the first exhibition of the Wanderers, the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions, in Saint Petersburg in November 1871. Pavel Tretyakov bought it from the artist that year. The original title ended in an exclamation mark that later dropped away, and in English the picture is also called The Rooks Have Arrived.

Alexandre Benois called it a "lodestar" for Russian landscape painting. Isaac Levitan saw in it "a world of high poetry."

04Barge Haulers on the Volga, Ilya Repin (1870–1873)

Repin first saw men hauling barges in 1868, from a boat on the Neva in Saint Petersburg. The contrast between these people in harness and the elegant crowds strolling on the embankments struck him. He made two trips to the Volga and got to know many haulers, and each figure is a real man he painted there.

The canvas belongs to the State Russian Museum. It made Repin famous across Europe when it was shown at the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna, and the Imperial Academy of Arts gave him its Vigée-Lebrun Medal for expression. Repin's haulers also stand beside Courbet and Millet among ten Realist paintings and their stories.

05Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, Ilya Repin (1885)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

The full title of Repin's grieving tsar names a day: Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581. Repin followed the historian Nikolay Karamzin and chose the moment after the tsar struck his heir with a staff. The rage has drained away, and a horrified father holds his dying son.

Repin linked the idea to the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 and the executions that followed. He also tied it to the excitement of hearing Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic piece Antar in 1882. Friends posed for him: the painter Grigory Myasoyedov sat for the tsar, and the writer Vsevolod Garshin was one of the models for the son.

The canvas has been attacked twice. In 1913 a man slashed it three times with a knife, and Repin helped restore it. In May 2018 a visitor broke through the barrier and tore it with a metal pole, and The Art Newspaper's account of that attack covers the restoration that followed. The painting returned to display in December 2024, inside a climate-controlled, vandal-proof case.

Portrait, forest and legend

06Girl with Peaches, Valentin Serov (1887)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Serov painted Vera Mamontova at a table in her family's house at Abramtsevo. Her father, Savva Mamontov, was an industrialist and art patron. Serov began Girl with Peaches in mid-August 1887 and worked on it for more than a month. He was chasing what he called "that special freshness that you always feel in nature and do not see in paintings."

Every detail comes from the house. The peaches grew in the Abramtsevo greenhouse, and the wooden grenadier figure in the background was bought at a fair in Sergiev Posad and painted by Serov himself. The Tretyakov Gallery, which owns the portrait, calls it the harbinger of Impressionism in Russia. It won first prize at the Moscow Society of Art Lovers' competition in 1888.

07Morning in a Pine Forest, Ivan Shishkin (1889)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Shishkin painted the forest; his friend Konstantin Savitsky painted the bears. Look at the lower left of Shishkin's forest with the bears. Shishkin's signature and the date are there, and below them is Savitsky's name, covered by a brushstroke.

Pavel Tretyakov bought the picture from the Wanderers' exhibition in 1889. He paid a large sum for a landscape, and a quarter of it went to Savitsky.

Yet exhibition catalogs and Tretyakov's own collection always listed Shishkin alone. So, the gallery suggests in its notes on the two signatures, Savitsky may have painted over his own name. The same forest appears among twenty landscapes famous around the world.

08Bogatyrs, Viktor Vasnetsov (1881–1898)

Three heroes of Russian epic songs keep watch on horseback over the borders of their land. Ilya Muromets rides in the center, with a mace and a spear. Dobrynya Nikitich is at his side, and the youngest, Alyosha Popovich, carries a bow.

Vasnetsov drew the first pencil sketch in 1871. He saw the work as his "creative duty, an obligation to his native people." The finished canvas, nearly 15 feet wide, is dated 1881 to 1898.

Pavel Tretyakov bought Bogatyrs in June 1898, one of his last acquisitions. He gave Vasnetsov's work a large hall on the gallery's second floor. The museum also has Vasnetsov's earlier fairy-tale picture Alyonushka (1881), a girl alone on a stone by a dark pond.

The avant-garde

09Composition VII, Wassily Kandinsky (1913)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and studied law and economics there. In 1896 he saw a Haystacks picture by Monet at an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow. At thirty, he left for Munich to become an artist.

Kandinsky's Composition VII belongs to the Tretyakov Gallery. He made more than three dozen sketches and studies for it, most in the autumn of 1913. Then he painted the big canvas in four days, at the end of November.

Echoes of his earlier Apocalypse pictures still flicker in the storm: trumpeting angels, a horseman, the fiery chariot of Elijah. Kandinsky's other famous works run from The Blue Rider to Yellow-Red-Blue.

10Black Square, Kazimir Malevich (1915)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Malevich's Black Square made its debut at The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10, which opened in Petrograd in December 1915. He hung it high across a corner of the room, the place where a Russian home keeps its icons. The catalog listed it as Quadrangle, and its corners are not true right angles.

A 2015 study of the 1915 canvas at the Tretyakov found two earlier geometric compositions under the black paint. Malevich called his new style Suprematism and painted the square again. He made one in 1929 for his solo exhibition at the Tretyakov, after cracks had appeared on the first.

A small version from the early 1930s is now in the Hermitage, and the Russian Museum owns another, dated about 1923. Our article on the best-known all-black painting follows the black canvases that came after it, from Frank Stella to Pierre Soulages.

Four more famous Russian paintings to see

Alexander Ivanov spent nearly twenty years, from 1837 to 1857, on The Appearance of Christ Before the People. In the huge canvas, nearly 25 feet wide, John the Baptist preaches at the Jordan while a distant Christ walks toward the crowd. He made several hundred studies for it.

Ivan Kramskoy's Unknown Woman (1883) shows a fashionable lady in a carriage. She set off contradictory rumors among critics, and Vladimir Stasov called her "a cocotte in a carriage."

Mikhail Vrubel's Demon Seated (1890) grew out of Lermontov's poem The Demon. Vrubel said his demon was "not so much a spirit that is evil as one who is suffering and sorrowful." All three belong to the Tretyakov.

In Saint Petersburg, the Russian Museum has Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, painted from 1880 to 1891. Cossacks led by Ataman Ivan Sirko roar with laughter as they compose a mocking answer to the Ottoman sultan. Repin drew his first sketch for it in 1878. Alexander III bought the finished picture, and it hung in the Winter Palace until Nicholas II gave it to the museum in 1897.

Modern and contemporary Russian artists

Natalia Goncharova painted a series of peacocks in borrowed styles, from Egyptian to Futurist. Peacock in Bright Sunlight (Egyptian Style), from 1911, was shown at the Donkey's Tail exhibition in Moscow in 1912. It now belongs to the Tretyakov.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin began Bathing of the Red Horse in spring 1912 as a scene of boys bathing horses in the Volga. He then turned a ginger village horse red, taking the color from old Russian icons.

Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in Vitebsk, then in the Russian Empire and now in Belarus, and died in Saint-Paul, France, in 1985. His White Crucifixion (1938) shows Jesus as a Jewish martyr surrounded by scenes of pogroms. It belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago but was not on view in October 2026.

Two leading names in Russian contemporary art are Erik Bulatov, who died in 2025, and Ilya Kabakov, who died in 2023. Both were born in 1933 and came out of Soviet "unofficial" art.

Bulatov combined realistic painting with large lettered text. His Clouds Are Growing (2007) is built on lines by the poet Vsevolod Nekrasov. Bulatov wrote that his pictures "resemble posters, ads and photocards" yet "always turn out to be pictures."

Kabakov began in cramped basement studios, making what he called "weird objects." One is Machine Gun and Chickens (1966). He said its story partly reflects the situation of underground artists: "don't stick out, or you'll be killed."

Which ones suit a room at home

Most of these pictures were made for exhibition halls, and the crowds in Repin and Bryullov need a museum wall around them. The quieter Russian paintings carry best in a living room. Savrasov's spring thaw and Serov's sunlit portrait read clearly at a modest size, and a wider gallery of famous paintings holds more of the works people recognize.

Sources

• The Last Day of Pompeii, State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• The Ninth Wave, State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• The Ninth Wave, State Russian Museum on Google Arts & Culture
• The Rooks Have Arrived, Tretyakov Gallery
• Barge Haulers on the Volga, State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581, Tretyakov Gallery collection
• Study for Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, Tretyakov Gallery
• Ilya Repin's chilling painting of Ivan the Terrible goes back on show, The Art Newspaper (2022)
• Repin's Ivan the Terrible returned to the Tretyakov Gallery, Izvestia (2024)
• The Girl with Peaches, Tretyakov Gallery
• Morning in a Pine Forest, Tretyakov Gallery
• Bogatyrs, Tretyakov Gallery
• Kandinsky: Into the Unknown, Nasjonalmuseet (National Museum of Norway)
• Composition VII, Tretyakov Gallery
• The Black Suprematist Square (1915), Tretyakov Gallery
• Black Square (1929), Tretyakov Gallery
• Black Square (c. 1923), State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• The Appearance of Christ Before the People, Tretyakov Gallery
• Unknown Woman, Tretyakov Gallery
• Demon Seated, Tretyakov Gallery
• Zaporozhian Cossacks, State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• Peacock in Bright Sunlight (Egyptian Style), Tretyakov Gallery
• Bathing of the Red Horse, Tretyakov Gallery
• White Crucifixion, Art Institute of Chicago
• Clouds Are Growing, Tretyakov Gallery
• Machine Gun and Chickens, Tretyakov Gallery