Top 10 Famous Russian Paintings for 2026, Bryullov to Malevich

The ten famous Russian paintings on this list were all made between 1833 and 1915. The oldest is Karl Bryullov's The Last Day of Pompeii, where a volcano erupts over a crowd that runs for its life. The newest is Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, which is just a black shape on a white ground. A chart before the stories ranks all ten by how many times a month Americans look them up on Google.

In between, you will meet a storm at sea and the bears in a misty pine forest. You will also meet a team of barge haulers and a tsar who holds his dying son. The paintings are listed in the order they were made. As with all famous paintings from every era, the story behind each one changes what you notice in it. To compare them with other countries, look at the Dutch Golden Age masters and France's best-known paintings.

The ten Russian paintings in order of search interest

These are Google's monthly figures for the US, pulled in October 2026. Up or down compares the most recent half year with the one before it.

Repin's tsar and his dying son draw more than twice as many searches as the other nine combined. Bryullov's volcano fell the most, with 71% fewer searches in recent months.

The Academy and the sea

01The Last Day of Pompeii, Karl Bryullov (1833)

In the year 79, the volcano Vesuvius erupted over the Roman town of Pompeii. Bryullov painted The Last Day of Pompeii on a canvas more than 21 feet wide. To get the scene right, he read the letters of Pliny the Younger, a man who saw it happen. He also studied the ruins of the town that had been dug up.

Two of the people in the crowd are real. Bryullov painted himself as the artist on the temple steps, and he painted Countess Yulia Samoilova as the mother who holds her daughter. The painting was shown in Milan, Saint Petersburg and Paris. At the Paris Salon of 1834, France's big official art show, it won him a gold medal.

02The Ninth Wave, Ivan Aivazovsky (1850)

Sailors have an old story that says the ninth wave is the strongest of all. In Aivazovsky's The Ninth Wave, that wave is still on its way. A few people lived through a storm in the night, and now they hold on to a broken mast.

But the sun is coming up, and its warm light breaks through the spray, so the scene feels full of hope. Aivazovsky, who painted it in 1850, was born in 1817 in Feodosia, a town on the coast of Crimea.

Realism and the Wanderers

03The Rooks Have Come Back, Aleksey Savrasov (1871)

In early spring 1871, Aleksey Savrasov went to the Volga River to get over the death of his newborn baby girl. He made his first sketches in a village called Molvitino. Then he finished The Rooks Have Come Back in his studio in Moscow. Birch trees full of rooks' nests, wet snow, puddles and a village church fill almost the whole of this small painting.

That November it hung in the first show of the Wanderers. This group of painters had a long full name, the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions. The collector Pavel Tretyakov bought the painting from Savrasov that same year. The painter Isaac Levitan said he saw in it "a world of high poetry."

04Barge Haulers on the Volga, Ilya Repin (1870–1873)

In 1868, Ilya Repin was in a boat on the Neva River in Saint Petersburg. That is when he first saw men hauling barges. In Barge Haulers on the Volga, they wear leather straps and lean into a long rope. Repin was struck by how different they looked from the well-dressed crowds who strolled along the river.

He went to the Volga twice and got to know many haulers. Every man in the painting is a real person he painted there. The painting was shown at the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873, and it made Repin famous all over Europe. You can see his haulers next to Courbet and Millet in ten Realist paintings and their stories.

05Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, Ilya Repin (1885)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581 ›

The full title of Repin's Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan names a day, November 16, 1581. Repin followed the story told by the historian Nikolay Karamzin. In a rage, the tsar hit his son with a staff. Repin painted the moment right after that. The anger is gone, and a father full of horror holds his dying son.

The painting has been attacked twice. In 1913 a man cut it three times with a knife, and Repin helped repair it. Then in May 2018, a visitor broke through the barrier and tore it with a metal pole. It was repaired again, and it went back on show in December 2024. Now it sits inside a case that keeps out both attackers and changes in the air.

Portrait, forest and legend

06Girl with Peaches, Valentin Serov (1887)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes of Girl with Peaches ›

Valentin Serov painted Vera Mamontova, the girl in Girl with Peaches, at a table in her family's house at Abramtsevo. Her father was a big businessman who helped artists. Serov started in the middle of August 1887, and he worked on it for more than a month. He was trying to catch what he called "that special freshness that you always feel in nature and do not see in paintings."

Everything in the picture comes from the house, and the peaches grew in the family's greenhouse. The wooden soldier figure behind her came from a fair, and Serov had painted it himself. In 1888 the portrait won first prize at an art contest in Moscow.

07Morning in a Pine Forest, Ivan Shishkin (1889)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes of Morning in a Pine Forest ›

Two painters made Morning in a Pine Forest. Ivan Shishkin painted the misty forest. His friend Konstantin Savitsky painted the bears that play on a fallen pine. Look at the lower left corner, and you will find Shishkin's name and the date. Below them is Savitsky's name, covered by a brushstroke.

Pavel Tretyakov bought the painting in 1889, and he paid a lot of money for a landscape. A quarter of it went to Savitsky, who joked about the sale like this:

“We killed the bears and shared the skins! And I as a participant have a quarter share.”

But the show's lists and Tretyakov's own records always named Shishkin as the only painter. So, as the Tretyakov's notes on the two signatures suggest, Savitsky may have painted over his own name. The same forest is one of twenty landscapes famous around the world.

08Bogatyrs, Viktor Vasnetsov (1881–1898)

In Bogatyrs, three heroes from old Russian songs sit on their horses. They keep watch over the borders of their land. Ilya Muromets rides in the middle with a mace and a spear. Dobrynya Nikitich is beside him, and the youngest, Alyosha Popovich, carries a bow.

Viktor Vasnetsov drew his first pencil sketch for it in 1871. But the finished painting, nearly 15 feet wide, is dated 1881 to 1898. He saw the work as his "creative duty, an obligation to his native people." Pavel Tretyakov bought it in June 1898, and it was one of the last paintings he ever bought.

The avant-garde

09Composition VII, Wassily Kandinsky (1913)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes of Composition VII ›

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, and he studied law there. In 1896 he saw one of Monet's haystack paintings at a show in Moscow. At the age of thirty, he left for the city of Munich to become an artist.

For Composition VII, he made more than three dozen sketches, most of them in the autumn of 1913. Then he painted the big canvas in just four days, at the end of November. In the storm of color, you can still find hints of his older paintings about the end of the world. Look for angels with trumpets, a rider on a horse and the fiery chariot of Elijah. You can follow the rest of his life through Kandinsky's other famous works.

10Black Square, Kazimir Malevich (1915)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes of Black Square ›

Kazimir Malevich first showed Black Square in December 1915, at a show in Petrograd. He hung it high across a corner of the room. That is the spot where a Russian home keeps its icons, or holy pictures. The show's list called it Quadrangle, which is a word for a shape with four sides. In fact, its corners aren't perfect right angles.

In 2015, a study of the painting found two older pictures hidden under the black paint. Over time, cracks appeared on this first square, and in 1929 Malevich painted it again for his own show at the Tretyakov Gallery.

When Malevich died in 1935, Black Square hung at the head of his coffin at the funeral. Another black square was fixed to the front of the car that carried him. You can follow the black paintings that came after his in our article on the best-known all-black painting.

Four more famous Russian paintings to see

Alexander Ivanov spent nearly twenty years, from 1837 to 1857, on The Appearance of Christ Before the People. In this huge painting, John the Baptist preaches by the Jordan River, while Christ walks toward the crowd from far away. Ivanov made hundreds of studies for it.

Ivan Kramskoy's Unknown Woman (1883) shows a stylish lady in a carriage, and she started rumors among critics. Mikhail Vrubel's Demon Seated (1890) comes from a poem called The Demon. Vrubel said his demon was "not so much a spirit that is evil as one who is suffering and sorrowful." All three of these belong to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

The Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg has Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which he worked on from 1880 to 1891. In it, a group of Cossacks roar with laughter while they write an answer that makes fun of the Ottoman sultan. Tsar Alexander III bought the painting, and it hung in the Winter Palace until 1897.

Modern and contemporary Russian artists

Natalia Goncharova painted a set of peacocks, and she gave each one a style borrowed from somewhere else. One of them, Peacock in Bright Sunlight (Egyptian Style) from 1911, now belongs to the Tretyakov.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin started Bathing of the Red Horse in spring 1912. At first it showed boys bathing horses in the Volga. Then he turned a ginger village horse red, and he took that color from old Russian icons. In 1914 the painting went to a show in Malmö, Sweden. War and revolution kept it there until 1950, when the painter's widow got his works back.

Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in Vitebsk, which is now in Belarus. His White Crucifixion (1938) shows Jesus as a Jewish martyr, a person killed for his faith. All around him are scenes of attacks on Jewish people. It belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago, but it was not on view in October 2026.

Two leading names in newer Russian art are Erik Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov. Both were born in 1933, and both came out of the "unofficial" art of the Soviet years. Bulatov died in 2025, and Kabakov died in 2023. Bulatov mixed lifelike painting with big painted words, as in Clouds Are Growing (2007). He wrote that his pictures "resemble posters, ads and photocards," but they "always turn out to be pictures."

Kabakov started out in small, crowded basement studios, where he made what he called "weird objects." One of them is Machine Gun and Chickens (1966). He said its story partly shows the life of underground artists at the time: "don't stick out, or you'll be killed."

Which ones suit a room at home

Most of these pictures were made for big halls, and the crowds in Repin and Bryullov need a museum wall around them. The quieter famous Russian paintings work best in a living room. Savrasov's spring thaw and Serov's sunlit portrait still look clear at a smaller size. For more of the works people know, see a wider gallery of famous paintings.

Sources

• The Last Day of Pompeii, State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• The Ninth Wave, State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• The Ninth Wave, State Russian Museum on Google Arts & Culture
• The Rooks Have Arrived, Tretyakov Gallery
• Barge Haulers on the Volga, State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581, Tretyakov Gallery collection
• Study for Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, Tretyakov Gallery
• Ilya Repin's chilling painting of Ivan the Terrible goes back on show, The Art Newspaper (2022)
• Repin's Ivan the Terrible returned to the Tretyakov Gallery, Izvestia (2024)
• The Girl with Peaches, Tretyakov Gallery
• Morning in a Pine Forest, Tretyakov Gallery
• Bogatyrs, Tretyakov Gallery
• Kandinsky: Into the Unknown, Nasjonalmuseet (National Museum of Norway)
• Composition VII, Tretyakov Gallery
• The Black Suprematist Square (1915), Tretyakov Gallery
• Black Square (1929), Tretyakov Gallery
• Black Square (c. 1923), State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• The Appearance of Christ Before the People, Tretyakov Gallery
• Unknown Woman, Tretyakov Gallery
• Demon Seated, Tretyakov Gallery
• Zaporozhian Cossacks, State Russian Museum catalog (Virtual Russian Museum)
• Peacock in Bright Sunlight (Egyptian Style), Tretyakov Gallery
• Bathing of the Red Horse, Tretyakov Gallery
• White Crucifixion, Art Institute of Chicago
• Clouds Are Growing, Tretyakov Gallery
• Machine Gun and Chickens, Tretyakov Gallery