Karl Pavlovich Bryullov

KARL PAVLOVICH BRYULLOV was a Russian painter, watercolourist, draughtsman and mural painter of the first half of the nineteenth century, associated with late Neoclassicism and Romanticism. He was born in Saint Petersburg into the family of Pavel Ivanovich Brullo, an academician of ornamental sculpture; until 1822 he used the surname Brullo. From 1809 to 1821 he studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts under Andrey Ivanov, Alexei Yegorov and Vasily Shebuyev, completing the course with a Large Gold Medal. In 1822 he went to Italy as a pensioner of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists and worked in Rome, Milan and Naples. Works from this period include Italian Midday, The Horsewoman and The Last Day of Pompeii; for the latter he received a Large Gold Medal at the Paris exhibition in 1834. After returning to Russia, he taught at the Imperial Academy of Arts from 1836 to 1849 and led its history-painting class. In the 1840s he worked on monumental and religious compositions for Kazan Cathedral and Saint Isaac's Cathedral. He was a member of the academies in Milan and Parma and of the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome, a professor of the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, and an honorary free associate of the Imperial Academy of Arts. From 1849 he lived outside Russia and from 1850 in Italy; he died in Manziana near Rome.