Karl Bryullov
Russian painter (1799-1852)
Karl Pavlovich Bryullov (né Brüllo; Russian: Карл Па́влович Брюлло́в; 23 December [O.S. 12 December] 1799 – 23 June [O.S. 11 June] 1852) was a Russian painter and draughtsman during the Romantic period, remembered among the greatest visual artists in the history of Russian art.
Biography
Karl Bryullov was born on 12 (23) December 1799 in St. Petersburg, in the family of the academician, woodcarver, and engraver Pavel Ivanovich Briullo (Brulleau, 1760—1833) who was of Huguenot descent. He felt drawn to Italy from his early years. Despite his education at the Imperial Academy of Arts (1809–1821), Bryullov never fully embraced the classical style taught by his mentors and promoted by his brother, Alexander Bryullov. After distinguishing himself as a promising and imaginative student and finishing his education, he left Russia for Rome where he worked until 1835 as a portraitist and genre painter, though his fame as an artist came when he began doing historical painting.
His best-known work, The Last Day of Pompeii (1830–1833), is a vast composition compared by Pushkin and Gogol to the best works of Rubens and Van Dyck. It created a sensation in Italy and established Bryullov as one of the finest European painters of his day. After completing this work, he triumphantly returned to the Russian capital, where he made many friends among the aristocracy and intellectual elite and obtained a high post in the Imperial Academy of Arts.
An anecdote concerning Bryullov appeared in Leo Tolstoy's essay "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?" and later in the same author's book What Is Art?.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karl Bryullov” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.