Mikhail Vrubel

For the last stretch of his life Mikhail Vrubel could not leave one figure alone: the Demon. Not a devil exactly, but the proud, lonely spirit from a poem by Lermontov, a being too powerful for heaven and too sorrowful for hell. Vrubel painted him again and again, most famously seated among jagged crystal mountains at sunset, a muscled body folded up in unbearable melancholy.

Vrubel painted in broken, faceted strokes, so his canvases look almost cut from coloured stone, close to mosaic. He had in fact studied Byzantine mosaics and restored medieval frescoes in Kyiv early on, and that hard, glittering surface never left him. His last Demon, shown in 1902, is a shattered, downcast creature, and by the time it hung on the wall the painter was collapsing into mental illness.

He spent his final years in and out of clinics, kept drawing even as his sight failed, and went blind before the end. He died in 1910 in Saint Petersburg, worn out and blind, and the Symbolist poet Alexander Blok spoke over his grave.