The paper deals with reception of the Spanish pictural images presented in the Russian fiction of the XIX - early XX centuries. The material of the study are works by I.A. Goncharov, A.F. Pisemsky, N.S. Leskov, N.D. Khvoshchinskaya, N.A. Leykin, L.N. Andreev, A.T. Averchenko. The analysis results show that the theme of the Spanish painting in the Russian fiction is focused on images of two painters - Bartolome Murillo and Diego Velazquez. What is more, with time there is a shift of contexts in which the writers put the images of the Spanish painters and their masterpieces. If in the middle of the XIX century these images are markers of the high art sphere that connect the Russian space with the latter, in the early XX century they represent gaps between elite classic art and mass culture of the epoch fin de siècle.