Ivan Vladimirov. "Scuttling of Black Sea Fleet Ships in the Sevastopol Roadstead"

Ivan Vladimirov's painting is devoted to an episode at the start of the defence of Sevastopol in the Crimean War: on 11 September 1854 Russian sailors scuttled their own ships at the entrance to Sevastopol Bay to bar the way to the enemy fleet.

After the defeat of the Russian army at the Alma, a council of war, against the proposal of Vice Admiral Vladimir Kornilov, who urged putting to sea and attacking the enemy, decided to sink the oldest ships, five ships of the line and two frigates, at the entrance to the bay and to use their guns and crews to reinforce the garrison. Across the fairway, between the Konstantinovskaya and Alexandrovskaya batteries, the frigates "Sizopol" and "Flora" and the ships of the line "Uriil", "Tri Svyatitelya", "Silistriya", "Selafail" and "Varna" went to the bottom. In the words of Pavel Nakhimov, this was done "to bar the enemy ships from entering the roadstead and thereby save Sevastopol".

In the painting a large three-masted sailing ship is settling into the water, the masts of vessels already sunk stick out of the waves, on the right is a steamer with a white cloud rising beside it, and in the distance is a shore fortification. On the rocky shore in the foreground officers and sailors stand by a boat. Ivan Alekseyevich Vladimirov (1869–1947) studied at the Academy of Arts under Bogdan Willewalde, Alexei Kivshenko and Franz Roubaud, and later, as an artist-correspondent for the magazine "Niva", covered the Russo-Japanese War, the Balkan Wars and the First World War.