The foundation of St. Petersburg

Painted in 1838, this large canvas depicting Peter the Great founding St. Petersburg is among the most ambitious historical subjects Venetsianov undertook, marking a departure from his characteristic peasant genre scenes. The founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 was the supreme origin myth of the Russian imperial state, and Venetsianov's treatment — showing the tsar gesturing over the Neva delta toward the future city — participates in the official culture of historical glorification that dominated Russian state painting under Nicholas I. The Tretyakov Gallery preserves the work as an example of how even Russia's most committed genre painter was drawn, in the late career, into the orbit of nationally significant historical subjects. The painting reflects the tension within Russian Romanticism between the private, particular world of peasant life and the grand public narrative of imperial history.

The large canvas is handled with a grandeur appropriate to the historical subject, with sweeping landscape and atmospheric sky given equal weight with the figure of the tsar. Paint application is broader and more confident than in Venetsianov's intimate genre works. The tsar's figure is placed against open sky, silhouetted for maximum symbolic legibility.