2-708-696 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'The Last Day of Pompeii', 1833, detail, (1965). Depiction of people fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy in 79 AD. 'The picture is based upon the Younger Pliny's story of the destruction of Pompeii'. Bryullov used as models his friend Countess Yuliya Pavlova Samoylova and her daughters, seen here in the foreground. The painter himself is portrayed, holding on his head a box of brushes and paints. Karl Bryullov (1799-1852) lived and worked in Rome for some years and is regarded as a key figure in the transition from Russian neoclassicism to romanticism. Painting in the collection of The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. From "Russian Painting of the 18th and 19th Centuries" by Vladimir Fiala. [Artia, Czechoslovakia, 1965]