Portrait of the Writer A. N. Strugovshchikov

Bryullov painted this portrait of the writer Alexander Strugovshchikov in 1840, during his Saint Petersburg period after his triumphant return from Italy. Strugovshchikov was a minor literary figure — primarily known as a translator of Goethe and Schiller — who moved in the intellectual circles overlapping with Bryullov's social world in the capital. By 1840 Bryullov was the dominant figure in Russian academic art, loaded with official honors but privately dissatisfied with the constraints of his position and increasingly exhausted by the demands of court patronage. His portraits of literary and intellectual figures from this period — Strugovshchikov, the poet Kukolnik, the writer Krylov — form a group of informal, psychologically acute works quite different from his official commissions, in which the subject is treated as a peer rather than a patron.

The informal intellectual portrait allows Bryullov to relax the conventions of official portraiture, producing a more psychologically penetrating and compositionally free work. The handling of the face is particularly direct and acute.