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Portrait of the Writer Varvara Lizogub
Tropinin Vasiliy,
Oil on сanvas
82,5 x 68
State Russian Museum
Annotation
The writer and representative of the intellectual elite is depicted by the artist as if she were participating in some kind of masquerade. She is dressed in an Eastern costume and in a headdress that resembles a Russian kokoshnik. Lizogub, Varvara Ippolitovna (née Petrovskaya; dates unknown) was the wife of the colonel Vasily Ivanovich Lizogub (1801–1870). Lizogub was the author of the Zuleika narrative poem, published in August 1845, and of poetry published in the magazine Moskvityanin (1841, No. 7).
Author's Biography
Tropinin Vasiliy
Tropinin, Vasily Andreyevich
1776, Karpovo (Novgorod Province) -1857, Moscow
Portraitist, genre painter, landscapist, draughtsman. Serf of Count Minich and then Count Morkov. External student at the Imperial Academy of Arts (from 1804). Called home by his owner, worked as a serf painter in the Ukraine and Moscow. Freed from serfdom and nominated to the Imperial Academy of Arts (1823). Academician (1824). Mostly worked in Moscow, influencing the Moscow school of painting. Painted portraits of such contemporaries as Alexander Pushkin and single-figure genre compositions. Contributed to many exhibitions in Moscow and St Petersburg.