The Fire of Moscow in 1812, by the Russian artist of Polish origin Viktor Mazurovsky

The Fire of Moscow in 1812, by the Russian artist of Polish origin Viktor Mazurovsky. Note the walls of the Kremlin, which are clearly red here. If so, this is an error on the part of the painter, for in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Kremlin walls and towers were white. They had been whitewashed since 1680 at the latest, when the practice is mentioned in a memorandum addressed to the Tsar. Thirty years earlier, however, the Kremlin was still red, as shown in Vladimir Ushakov's icon "The Praise of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God". The Kremlin began to turn red again only at the very end of the nineteenth century, when the whitewash started to flake off and was gradually no longer renewed, so that by the 1910s, when Mazurovsky was probably copying the ancient walls, the almost entirely peeled red walls had come into view. By the 1940s the walls had been painted to imitate red brick, and the Muscovite fortress appeared almost in its original form