Vassily Sergeyevich Smirnov

Death of Nero was bought by Emperor Alexander III after the Imperial Academy exhibition of 1889, and it is now in the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. Vasily Smirnov painted it in Rome between 1886 and 1888, while abroad on the Academy's travelling scholarship.

He had won that scholarship in 1883 with a Grand Gold Medal for a scene from Russian history, Saint Michael of Chernigov before the tent of Batu Khan, the Mongol ruler. In Italy his subjects turned to the ancient world. He spent the summers of 1885 to 1887 sketching at Pompeii and worked out a manner of thick paint in the lit areas against thin, transparent shadows. In Death of Nero he told the emperor's end through the play of stillness and movement, with little anecdotal detail.

Smirnov was born in Moscow in 1858 and studied first under Vasily Perov, the realist painter, then in Saint Petersburg under Pavel Chistyakov, the teacher of Repin and Surikov. His last picture showed a Byzantine empress on a morning visit to her ancestors' tombs, drawn from sixth-century mosaics. He died of tuberculosis in December 1890, aged 32, on his way home to Russia.