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Vasily Perov, "Troika,"

Ivan Kramskoy, "Portrait of Leo Tolstoy"

Vasily Surikov, "The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy"

Vasily Surikov, "The Boyarina Morozova"

Ilya Repin, "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan"

The 1860s, when Tolstoy was writing War and Peace, was a time of severe turbulence and revolution in the arts in Russia. Nikolai Chernyshevsky's famous 1855  treatise, "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality," in which he asserted that art must not only reflect reality but also explain and judge it, served as a blueprint for an entire generation of writers and painters. The most significant group in this respect was the "Wanderers," visual artists of immense talent and political fearlessness.

Vasily Perov was the direct predecessor to the Wanderers. In his paintings he depicted the corruption and in humanity of Russian life. His painting "Troika," in which three children are hauling a heavily burdened sled, juxtaposes the innocent, powerless peasantry with the state authority, represented by the massive wall behind them.

The Wanderers were founded by Ivan Kramskoy in 1871 as a reaction to the rigid rules of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts. Kramskoy was an outstanding portrait artist, and one of his subjects was Tolstoy himself.

Since it was dangerous to directly criticize the Russian government, many of the Wanderers chose historical painting as a way to allegorically express their dissatisfaction with the current status quo. Vasily Surikov was one such artist. In "The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy," he depicts the old guard nobles who rebelled against Peter the Great in the 1790s  on Red Square, where they are to be hanged. 

In his other memorable work, "The Boyarina Morozova," Surikov portays an "Old Believer," i. e. a Russian  who refused to accept the politically motivated church reforms of the  mid-1600s, as she is being dragged off to execution.

The greatest artist of the time, however, was inarguably Ilya Repin. A poor peasant, he saw the worst of Tsarist abuses and the destruction wrought by the ill-planned reforms of Alexander II. His greatest historical painting, "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan," depicts the moment after Ivan the Terrible has fatally struck his son and successor to the throne. The allegory of the regime destroyed by the rashness of its ruler was all too clear, and the painting was banned.