In 1870 Tsarina Maria Alexandrovna bought one of Harlamoff's paintings. In April he sent his first letter from Paris to Saint Petersburg. He spent September and October of that year in Normandy and the southern Netherlands with Alexey Bogolyubov, C. Huhn, and A. Lavezzari. He also travelled to Brussels and to London, where he visited an exhibition of Old Masters. In November the Academy of Arts commissioned him to copy Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp", and he stayed in The Hague.