Siege of Pskov

The unfinished 'Siege of Pskov' represents one of the most significant failed projects of Bryullov's career: a monumental history painting commissioned by Nicholas I depicting the 1581 siege of the city by Stefan Báthory's Polish-Lithuanian army. Bryullov began the work in the late 1830s and continued it intermittently for years but never completed it, a failure that weighed heavily on his later career. The painting became the site of a productive crisis about Russian historical painting: his technically brilliant but Italian-inflected approach to monumental history did not easily accommodate the specifically Russian national subjects that official patronage demanded. The unfinished state of the Russian Museum canvas is itself a historical document of the tensions between academic internationalism and nationalist cultural politics in imperial Russia.

The unfinished state reveals Bryullov's working method: areas of fully developed academic painting exist alongside bare canvas and broadly blocked-in passages, allowing rare insight into the construction process of a major history painting.