Porträt des Count Alexy Perovsky

This portrait of Count Alexei Perovsky, painted around 1835 and held in the Russian Museum, captures one of the more interesting literary figures of early nineteenth-century Russia. Count Alexei Perovsky is better known under his literary pseudonym Antony Pogorelsky, under which he wrote the famous fairy tale The Black Hen, or The Underground Inhabitants (1829), considered the first significant Russian literary fairy tale for children. Perovsky was also the uncle and mentor of Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy — whose portrait Bryullov also painted in 1836 — making this portrait part of a small network of literary-intellectual connections visible in Bryullov's output. By 1835 Perovsky was near the end of his life (he died in 1836), and the portrait may have been painted in his final year of activity. Bryullov's ability to attract commissions from literary intellectuals as well as aristocrats and court figures demonstrates his broad cultural prestige.

The portrait of a man in his late fifties (Perovsky was born in 1787) required Bryullov to capture maturity and intellectual weight. The neutral dark background focuses all attention on the face, where careful modeling around the eyes and brow conveys the sitter's literary sensibility. The title's German form again suggests the work passed through German-speaking ownership.