Portrait of Golovnin, Captain I Rank

Kiprensky's 1815 portrait of Captain Golovnin, painted in oil on canvas and now in the Hermitage Museum, depicts one of Russia's most celebrated naval officers and explorers at the height of his public recognition. Vasily Golovnin had become famous after his extraordinary captivity in Japan (1811-1813), during which he was held prisoner by the Japanese for two years before negotiating his release — an experience he documented in memoirs that became widely read across Russia and Europe. On his return he was received as a national hero, and Kiprensky's portrait commemorates this celebrity. The artist was at this point Russia's most celebrated portraitist, his romantic sensibility perfectly attuned to the new cult of the heroic individual that Napoleon had made the dominant mode of early nineteenth-century self-fashioning. The portrait belongs to a cluster of works from the 1810s in which Kiprensky depicted the military and naval figures whose careers the Napoleonic Wars had elevated to national prominence.

Oil on canvas, the portrait employs the romantic portraiture conventions that Kiprensky had developed partly through study of English portraiture — a three-quarter format, a luminous face emerging from relatively dark surroundings, a quality of directional light that models the features with dramatic clarity. The naval uniform is rendered with sufficient precision to identify rank while remaining subordinate to the characterisation of the face.