Konstantin Flavitsky

A young woman stands on a prison bed in a cell of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, while floodwater pours through the barred window and rats climb out of it. She is Princess Tarakanova, the pretender who claimed to be a daughter of Empress Elizabeth, and legend said she drowned there in the great flood of 1777. In fact she had died of consumption in December 1775, yet Konstantin Flavitsky's painting fixed the legend in Russian popular memory.

Flavitsky trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg under the history painter Fyodor Bruni, won its large gold medal, and spent 1856 to 1862 in Italy on an Academy grant, where he painted Christian Martyrs in the Colosseum. When Princess Tarakanova was shown at the Academy in 1864, the critic Vladimir Stasov called it the glory of the Russian school, and Flavitsky was made a professor. Two years later he died of tuberculosis, aged 35. The painting was bought by Pavel Tretyakov, the Moscow merchant whose gallery still holds it.