Karl Brioullov

In the 1830s Russian painting still answered to the Academy in St Petersburg, where the model was the calm classical order borrowed from ancient Rome. Karl Bryullov spent those years in Italy, and near Naples he walked the excavated streets of Pompeii — the town buried by Vesuvius in AD 79. The Street of the Tombs affected him so much that he set an enormous canvas right there, among falling statues and a sky the colour of ash.

He finished it in 1833, about six metres wide. Bryullov had read Pliny the Younger's eyewitness letter about the eruption, the one in which Pliny's uncle died, and he lit the whole scene with lightning and the red glow of the volcano. Count Anatoly Demidov, a wealthy Russian collector, paid for it. The canvas went first to the Brera gallery in Milan, then to the Paris Salon in 1834, where it won a gold medal.

Almost overnight Bryullov became the first Russian painter with a real reputation abroad. The picture inspired an English novel, Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, and when it reached St Petersburg the writers Pushkin and Gogol treated its arrival as a national event. It hangs now in the State Russian Museum there, where it was transferred in 1897.