Prinzessin Tarakanowa

Flavitsky painted this in 1864 and drew crowds with it. It shows a legend from the reign of Catherine the Great: a beautiful young woman who had claimed to be a lost daughter of the Empress Elizabeth, and so a rival for the throne, shut in a cell of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg as the river floods in through the bars. She stands on the bed as the black water rises and the rats climb with her. The real woman, an adventuress the court called Princess Tarakanova, had in truth died of tuberculosis in that prison two years before the great flood of 1777, so the drowning never happened. Flavitsky himself would be dead of the same disease within two years of finishing the picture.