Vasilij Surikov

Vasily Surikov grew up in Krasnoyarsk, deep in Siberia, in a Cossack family that still lived close to customs from before Peter the Great's reforms, and as a boy he watched public floggings carried out in the town square. To reach the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg in 1868, he traveled thousands of kilometers west with a merchant's caravan hauling frozen fish to the capital, since there was no faster way to get there.

That Siberian, pre-Petrine Russia stayed his real subject once he had trained. His three great history paintings, The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy in 1881, Menshikov at Beryozovo in 1883, and Boyarynya Morozova in 1887, all return to the same period, the brutal transition from old Muscovite Russia into Peter's modern empire. Boyarynya Morozova shows a noblewoman under arrest for refusing Patriarch Nikon's church reforms, dragged through a Moscow street on a sledge with two fingers raised, the Old Believers' banned sign of the cross.

The canvas is more than five meters wide, and Surikov spent years studying real faces in Moscow's markets and monasteries to fill it. Pavel Tretyakov bought it for his Moscow gallery the year it was finished, alongside the rest of Surikov's major historical paintings.