Dmitry Grigoryevich Levitsky

Dmitry Grigoryevich Levitsky (born 1735, Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Kyiv, Ukr.]—died April 4 [April 16, New Style], 1822, St. Petersburg, Russia) was a Ukrainian Russian artist who was the foremost portraitist of the era of Catherine the Great and conveyor of the ideals of the Enlightenment in the Russian Empire.

The son of a priest who was also a master of Ukrainian gravure printing, Levitsky inherited both his father’s Christian convictions and his artistic talent. After receiving basic art training from his father, he left Ukraine for St. Petersburg as a young man about 1758, yet his memories of his native land were reflected in the many paintings of his St. Petersburg period. These reveal in him an elemental and natural leaning toward decorative art and strong colours. This inclination was strengthened under the tutelage of Aleksey Antropov, a famous portraitist (possibly also of Ukrainian origin), whose apprentice Levitsky was from 1758 to 1762, helping him to decorate churches and secular buildings.

The portraits that Levitsky showed at the exhibitions of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1769–70 secured for him the title of academician, and in 1771 he became head of the academy’s portrait division, a position he held until 1787. During the decades of the 1770s and ’80s, Levitsky was at the zenith of his creativity and renown. He received many commissions from Catherine the Great and those in her closest circle, his portraits being expected to extol the humanistic accomplishments and political successes of her reign. The first of those works were portraits of grandees, trustees, and patrons of the aristocratic institution known as the Moscow Education House. The best single work was Levitsky’s portrait of Prokopy Demidov (1773), an extravagant millionaire who was a devotee of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the naturists. Levitsky portrayed Demidov in the open gallery of an exquisite palace, leaning elegantly on a watering can and pointing at some potted plants, in a clear allusion to the subject’s passion for both botany and philosophy.

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From 1772 to 1776 Levitsky painted a series of portraits of pupils of the Smolny Institute for Young Ladies of the Nobility, founded by Catherine the Great for the education of Russian society in the spirit of European imperial courts. In these as well as in a number of portraits of Catherine’s most-prominent generals, diplomats, and members of her circle—including the empress herself—Levitsky reflected Catherine’s many governmental accomplishments. The most famous of his portraits of the empress, executed in the spirit of the literary circle that Levitsky belonged to, depicted her as Legislator in the Temple of the Goddess of Justice (1783). Under Levitsky’s brush, the weighty subject matter was transformed into a splendid imperial display, portraying Catherine more as a personification of empresshood than a living person. As usual, for Levitsky the portrait was merely a delightful performance on a given theme.