Fyodor Rokotov

Biography

In the mid-1950s the art historian A. I. Mikhailov found a petition by Fyodor Rokotov, dated August 1776, in the Moscow Regional Historical Archive. In it the artist mentioned “my brother Nikita, son of Stepan, Rokotov, a servant of Prince Pyotr Ivanovich Repnin”, who had been set free together with his wife and children. It followed that the family had been serfs. Until this find Rokotov had been taken for a nobleman: his signature appears under the rules of the Moscow English Club, which admitted only noblemen.

To reconcile the two versions, a third was proposed: that Fyodor was the illegitimate son of Prince Repnin himself. Against it speaks the prince’s age, about twelve or thirteen at the time, and the fact that he lived in St Petersburg, at the Land Gentry Cadet Corps. And the file Mikhailov cited has not been found by present-day researchers under the reference he gave; nor has any paper on the freeing of the artist himself. I think the most honest thing is to admit that we do not know where Rokotov came from.

He was born around 1735 at Vorontsovo, an estate of the Princes Repnin outside Moscow that now lies within the city limits.

In 1755 Ivan Shuvalov, who was recruiting gifted young men in Moscow for the future Academy of Arts, noticed Rokotov and took him to St Petersburg. In his first years there he painted mostly cadets, so it is usually assumed that he served in the Land Gentry Cadet Corps; having risen to the rank of rotmistr, which conferred nobility, he left the service. From 1757 the Academy was housed in Shuvalov’s mansion, and, according to Jacob Stählin, Rokotov studied there with Louis Le Lorrain and Pietro Rotari. His only known work outside portraiture, a view of Shuvalov’s picture gallery, survives only in a copy by his pupil Andrei Zyablov. In 1760, on Shuvalov’s verbal order, he was enrolled in the Academy, and from 1762, by then an adjunct, he supervised the work of other students. In 1763 Rokotov was summoned to Moscow to paint the coronation portrait of Catherine II. The profile so flattered the empress that she ordered her face to be painted from Rokotov’s originals in future. In 1765 he became an academician for his portraits and a copy of Luca Giordano’s “Venus and Cupid”. Stählin once saw fifty unfinished portraits in his rooms at the same time. Ivan Betskoy forbade academicians to take private commissions, and that is probably why at the end of 1766 Rokotov returned to Moscow.

There commissions from old noble families awaited him, families that skilled painters rarely visited. A likeness of the face concerned him more than the finish of the clothes. In 1768 Bogdan Umsky commissioned from him portraits of the trustees of the Moscow Foundling Home, S. V. Gagarin, P. I. Vyrubov and I. N. Tyutchev, and complained at the same time that the young artist “had grown proud and haughty with fame”. It was Rokotov’s last official commission; from then on he worked only for private clients.

From the late 1760s to the early 1790s he painted, as the saying goes, “all of Moscow”, down to family galleries spanning two or three generations, as with the Counts Vorontsov. In these portraits young faces emerge from a dark background. Usually only one side of the face is lit, with the neck and a shoulder, and everything else sinks into half-light, while lace and ribbons are suggested by a few thin, liquid strokes, white or pinkish, and seem to shimmer. Such are the portrait of Alexandra Struyskaya (1772), which is called the Russian Mona Lisa, and “Portrait of an Unknown Woman in a Pink Dress” (1770s).

In 1772 Rokotov was among the founders of the Moscow English Club, whose rules bear six signatures, one of them his. He was a Freemason, belonged in 1774 to the Moscow lodge “Clio” and subscribed to Novikov’s journal “Morning Light”. He had no family of his own. In 1776 he obtained freedom for his nephews, placed them in a cadet corps and made them his heirs; later one rose to the rank of major, the other to staff captain. In 1781 the artist bought a plot of land on Staraya Basmannaya Street.

He worked slowly, according to an old account: he never finished anything from life in less than a month. Yet a great many portraits bearing his name survive, and probably many were painted together with pupils; in 1787 four serfs lived in his house, among them the brothers Pyotr and Ivan Andreyev, his pupils. I. G. Romanycheva’s monograph lists 152 works as authentic, and only seven of them are signed. In the 1780s his manner changes: the rococo haze lifts, the colour becomes more definite, the portraits grow more elegant and closer to classicism, and the female portraits are mostly oval. After the crushing of the Moscow Freemasons the number of his works falls sharply. The last known ones date from the early 1790s; their colours are sparse, almost monochrome, which is usually put down to his failing eyesight. Almost nothing is known of the last twenty years of his life.

Provincial museums and private collections hold many portraits in the Rokotov manner: in late eighteenth-century Moscow there was evidently a whole circle of his pupils and imitators, and their hands are still poorly distinguished. Rokotov himself was almost forgotten by the beginning of the twentieth century. He was brought back by Sergei Diaghilev, who in 1905 organised an exhibition of Russian portraits in the Tauride Palace; at that time the Russian Museum had not a single work of his, and the Tretyakov Gallery had only the portrait of G. G. Orlov. In the 1920s his pictures began to enter museums from nationalised collections, and in 1953 Nikolai Zabolotsky wrote a poem on the portrait of Struyskaya that became a classic.

Rokotov died in Moscow on 12 (24) December 1808. His nephews buried him in the cemetery of the Novospassky Monastery; the grave was soon lost, and a memorial stone was placed there only in 2008.