Portrait of a young lady

# 68

Oil paint on canvas, 12×15 inches. Handmade oil painting.

Масло, холст, 40 * 50 см

Portrait of a young lady

Portrait of a young lady — an oil painting on canvas executed in a series of people especially dear to the author. The whole girl glows with the inner light of joy and happiness. This is one of the most important days in her life. The artist was able to capture this aura of happiness and transfer it to the canvas. The portrait of a young lady is one of those paintings by the author, who, as it were, created himself, and the artist only helped with a brush and paints. Handmade oil painting.

See other paintings by Evgenia Zragevskaya here: Memories of Amsterdam

A portrait of a young lady, they are both young ladies and peasant women … Female beauty is not divided into estates. She only inspires to create masterpieces. And sometimes it is female portraits that make you remember the artist’s name not for years, but for centuries. Alyonushka’s sadness is based on a fairy tale story, but the picture was painted from a real girl. Viktor Vasnetsov noticed her in the Akhtyrka estate. Loneliness and «Russian melancholy» determined the plot. And the features, according to the artist, are those of Verusha Mamontova, the daughter of a famous philanthropist. Echoes girlish sadness and nature, intertwined with the poetry of folk tales.
The most famous «Unknown». A hundred years of conjectures about a person looking down from the crew on the Anichkov Bridge. The prototypes were predicted to be the maid of the columned noblewoman Bestuzheva, the wife of the artist and even the daughter of Catherine Dolgoruky and Alexander II. Where is the truth? Not a word, not a hint — neither in Kramskoy’s letters, nor in his diaries.
The lacemaker who brought fame to the artist. The crafty craftswoman was only momentarily distracted from her work… Vasily Tropinin, a serf who received his freedom at the age of 47, caught and conveyed the quiet beauty on canvas, which earned him a diploma as a painter from the Academy of Arts. And his creation opened the «genre portrait».
Sophia Augusta Frederick of Anhalt-Zerbst, or simply — Catherine II. Russia is indebted to this Empress for the Age of Enlightenment. Empress and woman. “She was condescending, loved life, was distinguished by cheerfulness of temper” — a verbal self-portrait-epitaph. And there were many portraits. And at all, as in the picture of Rokotov, greatness coexists with grace.