The Eighteenth Century
Countess V. P. Razumovsky, and of the Kalmyk lady, Fatyanov. Incomparably poorer are the series of other portraits of Argunov, but even these, in addition to the charm of the past, interesting costumes, hair-dressing and poses, have many fine, purely pictorial sides. Among these are fairly good painting (I. Argunov was G. H. Grot's pupil) and sufficiently correct design.
Almost equally confused is our notion of the other prominent Elizabethan painter, Alexyey Petrovich Antropov (1716–1795). He was a person, it seems, of no ordinary calibre. His main merit consisted in the establishment of his own school of painting, which counterbalanced the official Academy, and which produced one of the greatest Russian painters, Levitzky. The descendants of the latter have to this very day preserved memories of Antropov, as of an independent man, who held in disdain the official artistic world and warned his young pupil against the pernicious influence of the Academy.
Another fact which speaks in favour of Antropov is the plasticity of his nature. He was all of 41, when, having become an admirer of the art of Rotari, who had just come to Russia (in 1757), he assimilated and made his own the firm and lucid manner of the famous Italian master. It is in this manner that Antropov's two best portraits are executed: the portrait of the unknown in
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