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Vasily Smirnov painted this in Rome in the late 1880s, sent there for four years on a scholarship from the St Petersburg Academy. He chose the last hours of the emperor Nero, whose sprawled body a small group gathers around in a marble hall. When the finished canvas reached St Petersburg in 1888 it earned Smirnov the rank of academician, and Tsar Alexander III bought it. It should have been the start of a long career. Smirnov fell ill with tuberculosis and died in 1890, only 32 years old, and this large history painting remained the fullest thing he ever managed to finish.