Greek lying on a rock and a study of a head

When Karl Briullov was born in 1799, the Neoclassical style in Russia still reigned, but the period of its greatest productivity and popularity was over. Perhaps this influenced Briullov's early distaste for the return to classicism; at any rate, despite his education at the St. Petersburg Acedemy of Arts (1809-1821), Briullov never fully embraced the style taught by the Academy. After distinguising himself as a promising and imaginative student and finishing his education, he left Russia for Rome. Once in Italy, notwithstanding the warnings of the Society for the encouragement of Artists, which had funded his travels, Briullov applied himself wholeheartedly to portraits and genre painting. He produced a group of pictures tht showed the joys of living, for Briullov saw beauty in the profusion of sensations in life, in the immediacy of human feelings, in simple everyday things.
Before returning to Russia in 1835 to take up a post as professor at the Academy of Arts, Briullov set off on an artistic expedition to Greece, Turkey and Asia Minor.
For a similar ink drawing of a Greek see Leontieva, G. Karl Briullov (Leningrad, 1986) p. 65, ill.