After distinguishing himself as a promising and imaginative student and finishing his education, he left Russia for Rome where he worked until 1835 as a portraitist and genre painter, though his fame as an artist came when he began doing historical painting.

After completing this work, he triumphantly returned to the Russian capital, where he made many friends among the aristocracy and intellectual elite and obtained a high post in the Imperial Academy of Arts.

While teaching at the academy (1836–1848) he developed a portrait style which combined a neoclassical simplicity with a romantic tendency that fused well, and his penchant for realism was satisfied with an intriguing level of psychological penetration.

Bryullov's work is the pinnacle of late Russian Romanticism when the sense of harmonic wholeness and beauty of the world is replaced by a feeling of tragedy and conflict of life.

An outstanding master of both ceremonial and chamber portraits, Bryullov evolved in his art from the joyful embrace of life in his early works to the intricate psychologism of his later ones, thus anticipating the achievements of such artists like Ilya Repin in the second half of the 19th century.