Nikolai Kravchenko. The Loss of the Battleship "Petropavlovsk"

Nikolai Kravchenko witnessed what he painted: in 1904 he was in Port Arthur, saw the loss of the squadron battleship "Petropavlovsk" and then vividly described it in the newspaper "Novoye Vremya". The picture was painted the same year.

On the morning of 31 March 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, the battleship, flying the flag of Vice Admiral Stepan Makarov, led the squadron out of Port Arthur. An explosion tore through the bow on the starboard side: the ship had run onto mines laid overnight by a Japanese minelayer. The ammunition detonated, within a minute the battleship went down by the bow, then the boilers exploded, and the ship broke in two and sank. Makarov died together with 10 officers of his staff, 17 or 18 of the ship's officers, more than 600 sailors and the battle painter Vasily Vereshchagin; 80 people were saved, among them the ship's commander and Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich.

Kravchenko shows the ship's last moments: the hull has heeled over, exposing its red underwater part, while the funnels and masts are almost hidden by a huge cloud of black smoke shot through with flame. Oil on canvas. Nikolai Ivanovich Kravchenko (1867–1941) was born in Simferopol and studied at an art school in Odessa, in the battle painting class of Bogdan Willewalde at the Academy of Arts, and then in Paris.