Portrait of the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) Orest Adamovich Kiprensky (1782-1836)

Description of Orest Kiprensky’s Portrait of Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin is deservedly called the Sun of Russian poetry. And that is exactly how we see him in this portrait by Orest Kiprensky. This artist had a reputation as one of the best portrait painters, and that is why he was commissioned by Anton Delvig to portray his friend - the great poet Alexander Pushkin.

Contemporaries found that the portrait is quite realistic. The poet is depicted in a jacket and a cape thrown over one shoulder. That’s how young people were dressed then, according to fashion. But the lighting in the picture is chosen so that most clearly stands out not clothes, and the head of Pushkin. His face seems to glow, it is marked with the stamp of inspiration. It seems that the poet is thinking over a new poem.

At the same time in the poet’s face one can feel anxiety, it can be seen in his tensely compressed lips. The poet’s gaze is rather sad, you can’t read serenity in it. But in the whole pose there is submission and serenity. This can be seen in his elegant arms crossed on his chest.

It is impossible not to notice the figure of a muse in the corner of the portrait. The bronze statuette is holding a lyre. This is the muse, which Pushkin mentioned more than once in his poems. Kiprensky wanted to show that the poet and his inspiration are never separated.

Since the portrait was painted while the genius was still alive, then there remains some information about how the poet himself assessed it. Pushkin found that the artist embellished his appearance. However, the talent of a true portrait painter consists not in conveying all the features of the face with photographic precision, but in portraying the spiritual world of a person. That is why, centuries and years later, we see how spiritual Pushkin is, how his face shines with illumination. Kiprensky conveyed to posterity exactly what we should know about the great Russian poet. After all, to judge how Pushkin looked, we can only by his portraits. The rest is in the poems and prose of the genius.