Dmitriy Petrovich Voeykov

Dmitry Petrovich Voeykov was painted by Tropinin in 1842, when the painter was sixty-seven and the subject was presumably a man of middle years — a period of Tropinin's career characterized by sustained productivity within a narrowing social world as the Russia of Nicholas I became progressively more conservative and the liberal Romantic culture of Alexander I's era faded into memory. The Tretyakov Gallery's holding places the canvas within the national collection's broad coverage of Tropinin's Moscow bourgeois production. Voeykov's portrait belongs to the stream of male portraits that document Moscow's professional and administrative classes — the educated men who kept the empire functioning without the glamour of the military or diplomatic elite.

Oil on canvas in Tropinin's late-period male portrait manner: warm studio light, direct face modeling, confident broad strokes in the coat and background. The handling shows the assurance of a painter in his late sixties who has found his essential approach and executes it with practiced economy.