Portrait of Count Feliks Feliksovich Sumarokov-Yelstov later Prince Yusupov

Valentin Serov's 1903 portrait of Count Feliks Sumarokov-Yelstov, later to become Prince Felix Yusupov by inheritance, depicts the father of the man who would become notorious for participating in the murder of Rasputin in 1916. By 1903 the Yusupov family was among the wealthiest in Russia, their fortune built on estates, mines, and centuries of aristocratic patronage of the arts. Serov had by this date established himself as the foremost portrait painter in Russia, his sitters including Emperor Nicholas II, industrialists, artists, and members of the imperial court. His portraits of the aristocracy are notable for their psychological penetration — Serov was not content to produce flattering likenesses but sought to reveal character, a quality that not all his sitters appreciated. The Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg holds this work as part of its comprehensive collection of Serov's portraiture, which charts the social world of late imperial Russia with remarkable completeness. The portrait was painted a decade before the Yusupov family would become entangled in the revolutionary politics that would ultimately destroy the social world it depicts. Serov's treatment of aristocratic sitters consistently maintains a critical distance even while fulfilling the social and financial requirements of commissioned portraiture.

Oil on canvas with Serov's mature painterly technique, combining the brushwork freedom of his Impressionist-influenced approach with a commanding structural solidity in the figure. Aristocratic portrait commissions in this period typically required formal presentation, but Serov habitually finds the psychological character beneath the social surface through subtle adjustments of expression and bearing.