Portrait of K.G.Ravich

K.G. Ravich was portrayed by Tropinin in 1823, the year of his formal emancipation from serfdom — one of the most significant events of Tropinin's personal life, which occurred when he was forty-seven after decades of painting as a serf. The coincidence of this portrait's date with the year of his emancipation gives the canvas a particular resonance: Tropinin was beginning a new phase of professional life as a free man and full-time painter, and the portrait of Ravich belongs to the first productions of this liberated period. The Tretyakov Gallery's holding situates the canvas within the national collection at a moment when Tropinin was at the threshold of his most celebrated decade.

Oil on canvas produced in the newly established freedom of Tropinin's independent Moscow practice. The handling shows the confident maturity of a painter who had spent thirty years developing his technique across thousands of portrait sittings, the face modeling economical and precise, the warm palette already fully characteristic.