Famous Russian Paintings: 10 Masterpieces from Bryullov to Malevich

by Luciano Drehmer October 15, 2026

by Luciano Drehmer Published on October 15, 2026

Russia's best-known paintings run from Karl Bryullov's The Last Day of Pompeii (1833), an erupting volcano over a fleeing crowd, to Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915), a black shape on white that broke with everything before it. In between come Ivan Aivazovsky's storm at sea, Ilya Repin's barge haulers and his grief-stricken tsar, and the bear family in Ivan Shishkin's misty pine forest. Like the famous paintings people hang at home, each one has a story that changes how you see it.

The ten below are in date order, from the grand manner of the Imperial Academy through the realism of the 1870s and 1880s to the first abstract canvases. To compare other national schools, see our guides to Dutch Golden Age paintings and famous French paintings.

At a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Where to see it
1	The Last Day of Pompeii	Karl Bryullov	1833	State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
2	The Ninth Wave	Ivan Aivazovsky	1850	State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
3	The Rooks Have Come Back	Aleksey Savrasov	1871	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
4	Barge Haulers on the Volga	Ilya Repin	1870–1873	State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
5	Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan	Ilya Repin	1885	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
6	Girl with Peaches	Valentin Serov	1887	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
7	Morning in a Pine Forest	Ivan Shishkin (bears by Konstantin Savitsky)	1889	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
8	Bogatyrs	Viktor Vasnetsov	1881–1898	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
9	Composition VII	Wassily Kandinsky	1913	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
10	Black Square	Kazimir Malevich	1915	Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The Academy and the sea

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

Karl Bryullov, The Last Day of Pompeii, 1833 — Lightning and lava glow behind a crowd running from falling statues and columns.
Zoom

Bryullov's vast canvas of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 is oil on canvas, 456.5 × 651 cm (179.7 × 256.3 in). The State Russian Museum, which received it in 1897, dates it to 1833 in its catalog entry. According to the museum, Bryullov worked from the eyewitness letters Pliny the Younger wrote to Tacitus and from the excavated ruins themselves: the setting is the Road of Tombs, the town's necropolis, seen from the Gate of Hercules.

Two of the figures are real people. Bryullov painted himself as the artist on the temple steps, and Countess Yulia Samoilova as the mother holding her daughter. The picture was shown at the Brera in Milan in 1833, at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg in 1834 and at the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1835.

02The Ninth Wave, Ivan Aivazovsky (1850)

Ivan Aivazovsky, The Ninth Wave, 1850 — Survivors cling to a broken mast as a warm sunrise lights the swell.
Zoom

Aivazovsky was born in Feodosia, on the Crimean coast, in 1817. The Ninth Wave is oil on canvas, 221 × 332 cm (87.0 × 130.7 in). In sailors' legend the ninth wave is the most powerful and destructive of all, and here it is still bearing down. A handful of survivors hold on to the wreck of a mast after a night storm, and the dawn breaking through the spray reads as hope rather than doom.

It was acquired for the Imperial Hermitage and in 1897 became one of the first paintings in the new Russian Museum, which calls it probably Aivazovsky's most famous and popular work.

Realism and the Wanderers

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

Birches full of rooks' nests, wet snow, puddles and a village church: that is almost the whole picture, 62 × 48.5 cm (24.4 × 19.1 in). Savrasov traveled to the Volga in early spring 1871 to recover from the death of his newborn daughter. He made his first studies in the village of Molvitino, about 66 km from Kostroma, and finished The Rooks Have Come Back in his Moscow studio, according to the Tretyakov Gallery, which owns it.

It hung in the first exhibition of the Wanderers, the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions, in Saint Petersburg in November 1871, and Pavel Tretyakov bought it from the artist that year. The original title ended in an exclamation mark that later dropped away; the gallery now translates it as The Rooks Have Arrived. Alexandre Benois called the picture a "lodestar" for Russian landscape painting, and Isaac Levitan saw in it "a world of high poetry."

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

Repin first saw men hauling barges in 1868, from a boat on the Neva in Saint Petersburg, and was struck by the contrast between these people in harness and the elegant crowds strolling on the embankments. He made two trips to the Volga, got to know many haulers and based each figure on a real man he painted there, says the State Russian Museum, which owns the canvas: oil, 131.5 × 281 cm (51.8 × 110.6 in).

The painting made Repin famous across Europe when it was shown at the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna, and the Imperial Academy of Arts gave him its Vigée-Lebrun Medal for expression. Our guide to famous Realism paintings sets it beside Courbet and Millet.

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

Ilya Repin, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581, 1885 — A tsar clutches his dying son, horror in his eyes, on a carpet stained with blood.
Zoom

The full title names a day: Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581. Following the historian Nikolay Karamzin, Repin chose the moment after the tsar struck his heir with a staff: the rage has drained away, and a horrified father holds his dying son. The Tretyakov Gallery dates the canvas to 1885; it is oil, 199.5 × 254 cm (78.5 × 100.0 in).

Repin linked the idea to the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 and the executions that followed, and to the excitement of hearing Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic piece Antar in 1882. Friends posed for him: the painter Grigory Myasoyedov sat for the tsar, and the writer Vsevolod Garshin was one of the models for the son.

The canvas has been attacked twice. In 1913 a man slashed it three times with a knife, and Repin helped restore it; in May 2018 a visitor broke through the barrier and tore it with a metal pole, The Art Newspaper reported. After restoration it went back on display on 16 December 2024, inside a climate-controlled, vandal-proof case, according to Izvestia.

Portrait, forest and legend

06Girl with Peaches, Valentin Serov (1887)

Valentin Serov, Girl with Peaches, 1887 — A girl in a pink blouse with a black bow sits at a white table with peaches and maple leaves.
Zoom

Serov painted Vera Mamontova, daughter of the industrialist and art patron Savva Mamontov, at a table in the family house at Abramtsevo. He began in mid-August 1887 and worked for more than a month, after what he called "that special freshness that you always feel in nature and do not see in paintings." Girl with Peaches is oil on canvas, 91 × 85 cm (35.8 × 33.5 in), in the Tretyakov Gallery.

The details all come from the house: the peaches grew in the Abramtsevo greenhouse, and the wooden grenadier figure in the background was bought at a fair in Sergiev Posad and painted by Serov himself. The gallery calls the portrait the harbinger of Impressionism in Russia. It won first prize at the Moscow Society of Art Lovers' competition in 1888.

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

Ivan Shishkin, Morning in a Pine Forest, 1889 — A family of bears plays on a fallen pine while mist fills the forest behind them.
Zoom

Shishkin painted the forest; his friend Konstantin Savitsky painted the bears. The Tretyakov Gallery, which owns the canvas, 139 × 213 cm (54.7 × 83.9 in), points to the evidence at the lower left: Shishkin's signature with the date, and below it Savitsky's name, covered by a brushstroke and hard to see.

Pavel Tretyakov bought the picture at the 17th exhibition of the Wanderers for 4,000 rubles, a large sum for a landscape, and a quarter of it went to Savitsky. Exhibition catalogs and Tretyakov's own collection always listed Shishkin alone, so the gallery suggests Savitsky may have painted over his own name. The forest also has a place in our guide to the most famous landscape paintings in the world.

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

Konstantin Savitsky, joking about the sale of Morning in a Pine Forest, 1889 (translated)

08Bogatyrs, Viktor Vasnetsov (1881–1898)

Three heroes of Russian epic songs keep watch on horseback over the borders of their land: Ilya Muromets in the center with a mace and a spear, Dobrynya Nikitich, and the youngest, Alyosha Popovich, with a bow. Vasnetsov drew the first pencil sketch in 1871 and saw the work as his "creative duty, an obligation to his native people," in the Tretyakov's translation. The canvas is oil, 295.3 × 446 cm (116.3 × 175.6 in), dated 1881–1898.

Pavel Tretyakov bought it in June 1898, one of his last acquisitions, and gave Vasnetsov's work a large hall on the gallery's second floor, where Bogatyrs still hangs. Vasnetsov's earlier fairy-tale picture Alyonushka (1881), a girl alone on a stone by a dark pond, is in the same museum.

The avant-garde

09Composition VII, Wassily Kandinsky (1913)

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913 — Swirls, lines and patches of color collide across the canvas with no fixed center.
Zoom

Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and studied law and economics there. In 1896 he saw one of Monet's Haystacks at an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow, and at thirty he left for Munich to become an artist, as Norway's National Museum tells it.

Composition VII is oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm (78.7 × 118.1 in), in the Tretyakov Gallery. He made more than three dozen sketches and studies for it, most in the autumn of 1913, then painted the big canvas in four days, from 25 to 28 November. Echoes of his earlier Apocalypse pictures still flicker in the storm: trumpeting angels, a horseman, the fiery chariot of Elijah. Our list of famous Kandinsky paintings follows the rest of his career.

10Black Square, Kazimir Malevich (1915)

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915 — A black square, its paint covered in fine cracks, sits on a white ground.
Zoom

Malevich showed Black Square at The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10, which opened in Petrograd on 19 December 1915, and hung it high in a corner of the room, the place where a Russian home keeps its icons. The catalog listed it as Quadrangle, and its corners are not true right angles. The original belongs to the Tretyakov Gallery: oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm (31.3 × 31.3 in). A 2015 study there found two earlier geometric compositions under the black paint.

He called the new style Suprematism and painted the square again: in 1929 for his solo exhibition at the Tretyakov, after cracks had appeared on the first, and in a small version in the early 1930s that is now in the Hermitage. The Russian Museum owns another, dated about 1923. The full story is in our article on the famous all-black painting.

Four more to look for

Alexander Ivanov spent nearly twenty years, from 1837 to 1857, on The Appearance of Christ Before the People, a canvas 540 × 750 cm (212.6 × 295.3 in) in which John the Baptist preaches at the Jordan while a distant Christ walks toward the crowd; he made several hundred studies for it. Ivan Kramskoy's Unknown Woman (1883), a fashionable lady in a carriage, set off contradictory rumors among critics, and Vladimir Stasov called her "a cocotte in a carriage." Mikhail Vrubel's Demon Seated (1890) grew out of Lermontov's poem The Demon; Vrubel said his demon was "not so much a spirit that is evil as one who is suffering and sorrowful." All three are in the Tretyakov.

In Saint Petersburg, the Russian Museum also has Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880–1891), 203 × 358 cm (79.9 × 140.9 in): Cossacks led by Ataman Ivan Sirko roar with laughter as they compose a mocking answer to the Ottoman sultan. Repin drew his first sketch for it in 1878; Alexander III bought the finished picture, and it hung in the Winter Palace until Nicholas II gave it to the museum in 1897.

Modern and contemporary Russian artists

Malevich had company. Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) painted a series of peacocks in borrowed styles, from Egyptian to Futurist; Peacock in Bright Sunlight (Egyptian Style), 1911, was shown at the Donkey's Tail exhibition in Moscow in 1912 and is now in the Tretyakov. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939) began Bathing of the Red Horse in spring 1912 as a scene of boys bathing horses in the Volga, then turned a ginger village horse red, taking the color from old Russian icons.

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) was born in Vitebsk, then in the Russian Empire and now in Belarus, and died in Saint-Paul, France. His White Crucifixion (1938), at the Art Institute of Chicago, shows Jesus as a Jewish martyr surrounded by scenes of pogroms.

For Russian contemporary art, start with Erik Bulatov (1933–2025), whom the Tretyakov Gallery calls one of the leaders of Soviet "unofficial" art, and his contemporary Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023). Bulatov combined realistic painting with large lettered text; Clouds Are Growing (2007) is built on lines by the poet Vsevolod Nekrasov, and he wrote that his pictures "resemble posters, ads and photocards" yet "always turn out to be pictures." Kabakov began in cramped basement studios with what he called "weird objects," such as Machine Gun and Chickens (1966), a story that, he said, partly reflects the situation of underground artists: "don't stick out, or you'll be killed."

Russian painting at home

Most of these pictures were made for exhibition halls, and the crowds of Repin and Bryullov need a museum wall to breathe. The quieter ones carry best in a living room: Savrasov's spring thaw and Serov's sunlit portrait read clearly at a modest size. More of the works people recognize are on our famous paintings page.

Sources

by Luciano Drehmer Published on October 15, 2026

Paintings from this article

Painted by hand in oil on canvas. Free worldwide shipping, 90 day returns.

See all reproductions

Create a custom painting

We can paint anything you can show us or imagine

Real oil on canvas, painted by hand. Nothing is printed.

Pick anythingA famous painting, your photo, or an idea you describe.
We paint it by handA painter with 15+ years of practice, at the size you choose.
Approve, then it shipsSee a photo first. Shipping is free worldwide.

Customize a painting

An Art & See painter holding a hand-painted oil painting

Famous Russian Paintings: 10 Masterpieces from Bryullov to Malevich

At a glance

The Academy and the sea