Portrait of Maria Lopukhina

The portrait depicts Maria Ivanovna Lopukhina (1779–1803), the representative of the count family Tolstoy , the sister of Fedor Ivanovich Tolstoy , the wife of the chamberlain and chamberlain at the Court of Paul I, Stepan Avraamovich Lopukhin (1769-1814), the daughter-in-law of the Orel governor A. S. Lopukhin . “She died of consumption , ” wrote Y. I. Bulgakov on May 11, 1803 from Moscow to his son ^[1] : -

Prince S.I. Golitsyn is in a new sadness: the wife of his cousin Stepan Avraamovich Lopukhin, whom he married about a year ago, died from consumption, and not from singing, which killed Musketi lesser Ladomirskaya .

The artist used the traditional technique of a representative portrait - surrounding the character with objects and attributes that help to reveal his image. However, Borovikovsky did not try to show Lopukhina’s social status, but personal, intimate aspects of her character. The main theme of the portrait was the harmonious fusion of man with nature, characteristic of the aesthetics of the late 18th century , which developed under the influence of sentimentalism . The artist expresses this merger through compositional rhythmic and coloristic relationships. Lopukhin is depicted against the backdrop of a landscape that is largely conditional and decorative, but it already traces typical features of the Russian national landscape - trunks of birches , ears of rye , cornflowers . The landscape echoes the look of Lopukhina - the bend of her figure echoes the inclined ears, the white birches are reflected in the dress, the blue cornflowers echoes the silk belt, and the pale purple shawl echoes the drooping buds of roses. The artist managed to fill the image of his model with life authenticity, depth of feelings and extraordinary poetry. This portrait was admired not only by contemporaries, but also by spectators of the next generations. So, the Russian poet Yakov Petrovich Polonsky almost a hundred years later devoted the following lines to the portrait:

The portrait, created by Borovikovsky in 1797, was for a long time in the assembly of relatives. He was kept by the niece of Maria Ivanovna, daughter of Fyodor Tolstoy. The portrait was highly regarded as a heirloom. And it was in the house of Tolstoy’s daughter, Praskovia, who became the wife of the Moscow governor Perfiliev, that portrait was seen by Pavel Tretyakov in the late 1880s, and from there the painting fell into the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery.

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