The Mikhailovsky Palace

The collection of the Russian Museum offers a unique opportuntity to show the whole range of movements, trends and creative searches that existed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Works in the spirit of Neoclassical, Romantic, Realist and other traditions were displayed side by side at exhibitions of the Academy of Arts and, after 1824, at the Society for the Encouragement of Artists.

The  works by the professors of the Academy of Arts are displayed in the room, among them exhibits by the painters Grigory Ugryumov (Testing the Strengh of Jan Usmar, 1796), Andrey Ivanov  (The Heroism of a Young Kievian, 1810), Fidelio Bruni (The Brazen Serpent, 1841), and the sculptors Vasily Demut-Malinovsky (Russian Scaevola, 1813) and Piotr Stavasser (Mermaid, 1845).

Like The Last Day of Pompeii, Alexander Ivanov’s Christ’s Appearance to the People was a work epoch-making in Russian art. Ivanov worked on it in Italy for more than thirty years — practically his entire creative lifetime. The artist sought long and hard for these various reactions to the appearance of Christ, painting a multitude of figures, landscapes and compositional studies in the process of work on his canvas. The Russian Museum possesses a large final study of Christ’s Appearance to the People, preceding the picture now hanging in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.