Portrait of a Woman

Levitzky's Portrait of a Woman from 1780, now at the Radishchev Art Museum in Saratov, belongs to the network of provincial acquisitions through which Russian regional museums built their collections of eighteenth-century painting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Radishchev Museum, named for the radical writer Alexander Radishchev (whose imprisoned copy of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow was one of the great acts of Russian Enlightenment resistance), holds a collection that reflects Saratov's ambition to participate in national cultural memory. An unidentified female sitter in a 1780 Levitzky canvas would have been a prize acquisition — evidence of the period's material culture and the painter's technical range. The anonymity of the sitter places this work in the category of Levitzky's pure paintings, where quality of execution stands alone without the supplementary interest of a famous name.

Oil on canvas in Levitzky's mature female portrait manner: warm ochre ground, cool half-tones in the face shadows, careful differentiation of the dress fabrics. The background gradient, lightening behind the head, follows his standard spatial formula for isolating the sitter.