Antipova P. D.

Serov's 1890 portrait of P.D. Antipova belongs to his early mature period, when he was building the body of commissioned and independent portrait work that would establish him as Russia's foremost portrait painter. The identity of the sitter — P.D. Antipova — suggests a figure from the professional or intellectual classes of Moscow or Saint Petersburg, the social milieu in which Serov moved and from which his non-aristocratic commissions came. By 1890 Serov was twenty-five years old and had already produced his breakthrough early masterpieces; his technique was now fully formed and his reputation growing rapidly. Portraits of women from the professional and bourgeois classes allowed Serov a different kind of social and psychological observation than his aristocratic commissions — less formal constraint, potentially more psychological directness. His portraits from 1890 show the broadening of his social range as a portraitist: industrialists, intellectuals, artists, musicians, and members of the gentry all began to seek his work. The oil on canvas medium in these works demonstrates his increasing command of the full range of the portrait tradition, from the careful finish of formal commissions to the more freely handled studies he made for himself.

Oil on canvas with Serov's characteristic early mature technique, combining careful observation of the face with more freely handled passages in the hair, clothing, and background. His palette in 1890 maintained the luminous quality of his late 1880s work while beginning to show the greater tonal depth and psychological complexity of his middle period.