Kiprensky, Orest Adamovich

Orest Adamovich Kiprensky, (born March 13 [March 24, New Style], 1782, Koporye village, near St. Petersburg, Russia—died Oct. 5 [Oct. 17], 1836, Rome [Italy]), Russian artist and pioneer of Romanticism who was a master of portrait painting and the father of Russian portrait drawing.

Kiprensky’s birth was the result of a casual affair between a nobleman and a servant, and it would have been unremarkable had not a serf married the pregnant woman and raised the boy as his own. Six years later Kiprensky’s biological father, Aleksey Dyakonov, arranged for the boy to be a boarder at the preparatory school of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, from which he graduated in 1797. He thereafter entered the academy, where he enrolled in the historical painting class. Yet his reputation was based not on his historical compositions but rather on a portrait shown at the academy’s exhibition in 1804, a year after his graduation.

This portrait was unlike any other in the history of Russian painting. Instead of a presenting a generic model to the viewer, Kiprensky had painted an elderly man deeply absorbed in thought, impressive in his manly, almost heroic character. The novelty of the image is explained in part by Kiprensky’s appreciation of the work of Anthony Van Dyck, whose use of colour he had studied as a student. Perhaps the most important element of the painting was that the portrait was of his adoptive father, A.K. Shvalbe, whose moral fibre, it is obvious, was exceptional and had made a deep impression on his son. Judging by this portrait, which Kiprensky kept in his own possession, it was not dislike of his adoptive father that led him to take on the sonorous name Kiprensky (from kiprey, meaning “willow herb”) during his student years at the academy. Rather, it affirmed the proud (and bitter) independence of an individual from the circumstances of his birth and the fate dictated by them.

Kiprensky’s early self-portraits fully reveal his hard-earned sense of self-worth. One of those (c. 1808) shows the artist not posing but with an introspective air, a shadow hiding his face from the viewer, the enigmatic lighting revealing his intense inner life while the paintbrushes behind his ear attest to the concentrated solitude of his work. In another self-portrait (1828), Kiprensky meets the viewer with a determined turn of the head, his expression bold and open.

War in Europe hindered the artist from setting out for Italy upon his graduation from the academy, as was his dream. Instead, in 1809 he was sent to work in Moscow. In 1811 he went to Tver, and from 1812 to 1815 he once more lived in St. Petersburg. This period, throughout which his European travels were thwarted, proved to be the best period of his life. He associated with the finest members of Russian society and painted and drew a great number of portraits, each of which was a revelation. Although they were strikingly different in manner of execution, they had in common a clear sense of the sitter’s interior as well as exterior identity.

In 1816, by which time the much-admired and acclaimed Kiprensky had been accorded the title of academician, he finally traveled to Italy. But during his long stay abroad (until 1823), his focus shifted from capturing the personality of the model to virtuosic display. From that period on, his inspiration flagged, and it took an august figure such as Aleksandr Pushkin, whose portrait he painted in 1827, to stir his imagination and inspire him to the creation of a masterpiece. Kiprensky’s second journey to Italy in 1828 was accompanied by a progressive diminution of his talent. He died in Rome in 1936, three months after marrying his long-time Italian model.