Vasily Surikov

Vasily Surikov painted Russian history as crowd scenes, with no single hero and a great deal of mud. The Morning of the Streltsy Execution shows condemned men and their families in a Moscow square before dawn, and the drama sits in the faces rather than in any central action.

He was born in Krasnoyarsk into a Cossack family, which gave him a Siberian sense of the country that most St Petersburg trained painters lacked. He used relatives and people he knew as models for historical figures.

Boyarynya Morozova, showing an Old Believer being carried off in chains while onlookers react, took three years and dozens of studies. He joined the Peredvizhniki and worked slowly, producing relatively few major canvases, each one carrying an enormous amount of preparation.