The “guitarist” type was constantly varied in the art of Tropinin and came to personify a very special image of the democratic middleclass representative of town culture. This portrait of Pavel Vasilyev is one of the most penetrative and complete images in Tropinin’s art of the 1830s. The emotional candour of the portrait and the free demeanour of the subiect, caught unawares by the artist during a burst of creative inspiration, are typical of the Romantic artistic vision.
Pavel Mikhailovich Vasilyev (1798–1854): Music lover, worked as a book-keeper for the Moscow Imperial Theatres.

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.