The Eighteenth Century
master as Levitzky, junior, a product of local Kiev art, is hardly correct. The quick-witted highly impressionable youth found himself in Petrograd late in the fifties, that is, in the very hey-day of the activity of the foreign masters imported by Elizabeth, and, in all probability, his taste developed under the sole influence of this activity. The portraits of Rotari and Erichsen taught him firmness and lucidity in drawing, the pictures of Torelli and Leprince—sumptuosity of composition and elegance of poses; finally, to Tocqué and Roslin he owes his wonderful, purely French technique in the rendition of details. That Levitzky, nevertheless, has avoided the pit of "salon" mannerism, and preserved all the freshness of his provincialism, that he remained the keen, somewhat ironical observer, that his portraits, despite the Parisian caftans and wigs, exhale a great sincerity—all this we owe probably to that simple-natured Antropov, who drew to himself the gifted youth at the time he was painting icons for St. Andrew's Cathedral, at Kiev. It was he who took the young man to the northern capital and shielded him against the influence of the Academy and its bureaucratic spirit.
We distinguish two manners in the art of Levitzky. For the first thirty years of his activity his manner was that which he acquired in his studies of the French masters. The works belonging to this period are, for their
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