The Russian Mona Lisa
What feelings are concealed in her fathomless eyes? Is she smiling or going to cry? What preoccupies her young and beautiful mind?
The silent and pensive visage of Alexandra Struyskaya has captivated many hearts and will remain mysterious forever. The creator of this masterpiece himself — Fyodor Rokotov (1735–1808)— is still an enigma. One of the greatest Russian portraitists of the XVIIIth century, he was completely forgotten after his demise and rediscovered by art historians only at the beginning of the XXth century.
Little is known about his origins. He was born in a family of serfs belonging to the Prince P. Repnin. Some historians argue that he was actually the illegitimate son of the Prince. In any case, Repnin gave Rokotov his freedom early in his youth and probably contributed to him meeting Ivan Shuvalov, founder and first director of the Academy of Arts in Saint-Petersburg.
In 1760, Shuvalov issued a special order thanks to which Rokotov was accepted into the Academy despite being already too old for a normal student. He soon became an official portraitist and an adjunct of the Academy in 1762. His fame was rising steadily. He produced the portraits of many officials and aristocrats, as well as a ceremonial portrait of the Empress Catherine II in 1763. According to contemporaries, his workshop was sometimes filled with dozens of canvases on which he only painted the faces, his numerous students finishing the rest.
Despite this apparent success, the Academy admitted him to the ranks of Academician only in 1765. A year later, at the zenith of his career in Saint- Petersburg, he mysteriously decided to leave the city and settle in Moscow, where he would live alone for the rest of his life, and where his true talent would uncover itself.
Rokotov had this uncanny ability to create elusiveness, to show the fleeting nature of sentiments, and is distinctive by his perspicacity. While painting the 18 years-old Struyskaya in the year of her marriage with Nikolai Struyskyi, Rokotov might have had a presentiment about her future difficult life as the mother of eighteen children, many of whom would die in their infancies, and the wife of a psychologically unbalanced, cruel man, and unsuccessful poet. According to a legend, Rokotov, who probably never married but remained a close friend of the Struyskyi family throughout his life, was in love with Alexandra.
Struyskaya’s visage, filled with poetry and esthetic rapture, appears out of darkness as a mirage. Without finishing all the strokes, the painter communicates the shine of the pearls on her décolleté and the almost imperceptible rustlings of her satin dress, decorated with a transparent lace. Rokotov uses a subtle gradation of colours and tones to create volume and depict the light movement of her head, the elegant oval shape of her face repeated in the oval form of her décolleté, and the glow on her cheeks. The contours seem to melt away creating a nebulous, airy atmosphere.
Rokotov’s painting style marks a new evolutionary phase in Russian Art History. It inscribes itself in the aspiration to convey the psychology of the sitter that already appeared in Nikitin’s Portrait of the Field Hetman in the 1720s.
The portrait of Alexandra Struyskaya is considered by many as the most celebrated image of ideal beauty, grace, and enigma in Russian Portraiture, and is often referred to as The Russian Mona Lisa…
