Portrait of Procope Demidov

Prokofy Demidov was one of the most extraordinary and eccentric personalities in eighteenth-century Russia — heir to the Demidov industrial dynasty that had made its fortune in Ural iron and copper smelting, he spent freely on botanical gardens, charitable institutions, and provocative public displays of calculated eccentricity. Levitzky's 1773 portrait of him at the Tretyakov Gallery breaks decisively with the conventions of grand-manner portraiture: instead of the expected military uniform, official robes, or court dress, Demidov appears in a simple dressing gown, gesturing with a watering can toward the potted bulbs that surround him — his beloved tulips and hyacinths taking the place of allegorical symbols. The composition places the unconventional sitter against the Moscow Foundling Home, one of his charitable benefactions, visible through a window. The portrait is one of the most remarkable exercises in Russian individualist portraiture of the century, a deliberate anti-portrait that uses the conventions of formal painting to celebrate deliberate informality.

Oil on canvas deploying the grand-manner format ironically: the scale and pose of an official state portrait are applied to a man in a dressing gown surrounded by potted plants. Levitzky renders the botanical specimens with taxonomic precision in contrast to the looser handling of the figure, creating a deliberate visual joke that Demidov himself likely designed.