Vasily Vereshchagin

Vasily Vereshchagin painted war for a living, and he painted it to disgust. His best-known canvas, The Apotheosis of War from 1871, shows nothing but a pyramid of human skulls on a scorched plain with crows picking over it. On the frame he wrote a dedication to all conquerors, past, present and to come. He had seen the real thing — he travelled with Russian troops in Central Asia and later in the Balkans, and painted the dead and the wounded with a flatness that Russian generals found close to treason.

Some of his own work he thought too damning to survive, and three canvases criticising the army he is said to have burned himself. Tsar Alexander III disliked the pictures, and for years Vereshchagin exhibited more freely abroad than at home.

In 1904 the Russo-Japanese War broke out, and Vereshchagin, then 61, went to the front once more. Admiral Stepan Makarov invited him aboard his flagship, the battleship Petropavlovsk, off Port Arthur. On the 13th of April the ship struck two mines and sank in minutes, taking down almost the whole crew, the admiral, and the painter. His last picture, a war council on deck, was pulled from the water almost undamaged.