Portrait of Andrei Mikhailovich Bolotov

Andrei Mikhailovich Bolotov (1738–1833) was one of the most remarkable figures in Russian Enlightenment culture — agronomist, memoirist, botanical garden designer, and prolific writer who lived to ninety-five and left memoirs that are among the most detailed accounts of eighteenth-century Russian provincial life ever written. Tropinin painted him in 1838, when Bolotov was a hundred years old — an extraordinary commission that produced one of the most unusual portraits in the Russian Romantic tradition, a centenarian who had witnessed Catherine II's coup, Pugachev's rebellion, the Napoleonic invasion, and the Decembrist uprising, and who continued to write and think with undiminished clarity until the end. The Tretyakov Gallery's holding of this canvas makes it a cornerstone of Russian Romantic portraiture, combining the painter's mature mastery with one of the era's most exceptional subjects.

Oil on canvas confronting Tropinin with the extreme challenge of portraying a centenarian face while preserving the dignity and intelligence of the subject. The modeling of aged skin — the translucency, the texture, the particular quality of very old eyes — required all his technical resources, with thin glazes over a warm ground allowing the face to glow rather than sink into grey.