Portrait of Artemy Lazarev (1791-1813), the Poruchik of the Life Guards Hussars Regiment

Artemy Lazarev (1791–1813) was a young officer of the Life Guards Hussars Regiment who died at twenty-two in the campaigns of 1813, making this 1819 portrait by Tropinin a posthumous commemoration painted six years after the subject's death. The practice of posthumous portraiture was common in early nineteenth-century Russia — families commissioned paintings from existing miniatures, drawings, or verbal descriptions to preserve the likeness of young men killed in the Napoleonic wars. The Hermitage's holding of this canvas places it within the institution's extensive collection of post-Napoleonic military memorabilia. The Life Guards Hussars were among the most glamorous cavalry regiments in Russia, and the painting would have served as a family memorial combining grief, patriotic pride, and the visual splendor of the hussar uniform.

Oil on canvas executed from secondary sources rather than direct observation, as the subject was already dead when the portrait was made. Tropinin's skill in posthumous portraiture lay in animating the face with plausible life while working from inadequate visual data — the result typically has a slightly idealized quality compared to his portraits of living sitters.