Landscape on the island of Madeira

Landscape on the Island of Madeira, painted in 1850 on paper and held at the Russian Museum, was produced during Bryullov's stay on Madeira — the Atlantic archipelago belonging to Portugal — where he traveled in 1849–1850 to recover his health. Bryullov had suffered severely declining health since the late 1840s, including heart disease, and his doctors recommended the mild Atlantic climate of Madeira as a therapeutic environment. The landscape sketches produced there — of which this is among the most notable — show a side of Bryullov's art quite different from his monumental history paintings and formal portraits: intimate, atmospheric, exploratory. The choice of paper as support suggests an outdoor sketching practice, capturing the lush subtropical vegetation and dramatic Atlantic light of the island directly from observation. This late landscape, made two years before his death, shows an artist moving toward a looser, more atmospheric handling that prefigures later developments in Russian landscape painting.

The paper support and likely watercolor or gouache technique create a more responsive, atmospheric quality than Bryullov's oil canvases. The subtropical Madeiran landscape — volcanic rock, dense vegetation, Atlantic light — required a palette quite different from his Italian or Russian subjects. The work likely shows a more direct, less academically composed approach than his formal exhibition works.