Academy and Romanticism
After the victory over Napoleon, Russia gained a new self-confidence. The Academy's painters competed with the greatest in Europe, Bryullov's The Last Day of Pompeii won admiration in Paris, and Venetsianov and Fedotov began to paint everyday Russian life.
The Academy of Arts in St Petersburg was the hub of all training. Students drew from antique plaster casts, competed for gold medals and were sent to Rome as Academy stipendiaries. History painting with subjects from the Bible, antiquity and Russian history ranked highest, and that was where the great careers were made.
Karl Bryullov's The Last Day of Pompeii, painted in Rome in 1830–1833, was the first Russian painting to cause a stir in Europe and won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1834. Alexander Ivanov stayed in Rome for more than twenty years to paint The Appearance of Christ Before the People, a work that became both a triumph and a tragedy for him.
At the same time, a more personal and observant kind of painting emerged. Orest Kiprensky and Vasily Tropinin painted lifelike portraits, among them the best-known images of Pushkin. Alexei Venetsianov painted peasants and fields on his estate, and Pavel Fedotov depicted with irony the small world of clerks, merchants and impoverished officers.