Porträt der Maria Ivanovna Myussar

The portrait titled Porträt der Maria Ivanovna Myussar, dated 1790 and held at the Tretyakov Gallery, represents one of the socially ambiguous sitters whose identity survives only in a name — a woman neither famous enough to appear in historical records nor obscure enough to be entirely forgotten. Levitzky's canvas of 1790 marks his transition period: the great Catherinian commissions were largely complete, the painter was aging into his seventh decade, and the French Revolution was beginning to transform the political and cultural world whose conventions his art celebrated. The portrait at the Tretyakov preserves, in paint, a personality now otherwise lost to history. That Levitzky chose to paint her with the same careful attention he brought to empresses and ministers suggests a professional ethic of treating each sitter as deserving full artistic engagement regardless of their rank in the historical pecking order.

Oil on canvas in Levitzky's late-period female portrait style, which shows a slight loosening of the tight finish of his earlier work. The face is still carefully modeled but the background and dress handling are broader, reflecting both his aging hand and a general European shift toward more painterly execution in the 1780s–90s.