Portrait of A.A.Chelishchev

Portrait of A.A. Chelishchev, painted on panel in 1808 and now in the Tretyakov Gallery, is widely regarded as one of Kiprensky's greatest achievements and a founding document of Russian romantic portraiture. The sitter was a young man — still a teenager at the time of the portrait — and the image captures with extraordinary directness the quality of alert, unguarded intelligence in an adolescent face before social convention has fully formed its expression. Kiprensky had studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts under foreign masters and had recently begun to develop the approach to portraiture that would define his career. The panel support, unusual for a Russian painting of this period and scale, may reflect the influence of Italian Renaissance portraiture that Kiprensky admired. The portrait's combination of technical precision and psychological penetration makes it a work that looks forward to the great romantic portraits of the following decades.

Oil on panel, the portrait uses a dramatically vignetted composition — the young face emerging from a dark background with no setting — that concentrates all attention on the sitter's expression. Kiprensky models the face with a clarity that owes something to the intimate scale forced by the panel support, and the warm, slightly luminous flesh tones give the young face a quality of inner life that transcends mere likeness.