The Burning of the Turkish Flagship by Kanaris

Aivazovsky painted this in 1881. Konstantinos Kanaris, the man in the title, had died four years earlier in Athens, in office as prime minister of Greece. The night the picture shows was in June 1822. In reprisal for the massacre on Chios two months before, Kanaris took a fireship against the Ottoman flagship, an 84-gun ship of the line, fixed his burning boat to its side and pulled clear. The fire reached the powder store, and the explosion killed around 2,000 men aboard, the Ottoman admiral Nasuhzade Ali Pasha among them. Aivazovsky was five years old when that happened, and by 1881 he had spent decades as the painter attached to the Russian naval staff, so all of this is reconstruction, made 59 years after the event. The canvas is 162 by 223 centimetres and came to the Gallery from the National Technical University.