Rafail Levitsky

Biography

Levitsky did not keep the portrait of himself that Ilya Repin painted in 1878. In 1920 Repin gave it, together with other works, to Finland, and it is now in the Finnish National Gallery (Ateneum) in Helsinki.

There is no clarity about Levitsky’s own year of birth. Some sources give 5 August 1844 (24 July, Old Style), others 1847; in the second case the date seems to have been taken from old reference books. He was born in St Petersburg. His father was the portrait photographer Sergey Lvovich Levitsky (1819–1898), his mother Anna Antonovna, née Lane, by origin a subject of Darmstadt. The name, in honour of Raphael, was not chosen by chance, according to Pyotr Neradovsky: his father expected to raise a great painter out of his son. Alexander Herzen was Rafail’s second cousin once removed on his father’s side (a first cousin of Sergey Levitsky).

In 1866 Levitsky entered the Imperial Academy of Arts as a free student. According to Ilya Zilbershtein, he studied under Pavel Chistyakov. There he formed a friendship with Repin and Vasily Polenov that lasted all their lives. In 1867 he received two silver medals, and in 1872 several minor awards (by some accounts, two major and one minor). In 1877, on finishing the Academy, he received the title of class artist of the third degree. From 1880 he exhibited with the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), the association of artists who organised travelling exhibitions, taking part until 1894, and he also showed work at exhibitions of the Society of Russian Watercolourists. From 1884 he taught at the school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, the year his membership of the Society is also dated. By one account he ran the class in drawing and painting on porcelain until the school was closed in 1918; by another, until 1914. These accounts disagree, and I would not treat either version as final.

Polenov, it seems, influenced his landscapes: a freshness of colour and a finish of composition are noted that Levitsky took from his friend. While Levitsky was a bachelor, he lived and worked with Polenov at Devichye Pole in Moscow, in the attic of the Olsufyev house. Polenov depicted this house in his painting “Grandmother’s Garden” (1878). There Levitsky met Anna Vasilyevna Olsufyeva, granddaughter of the chamberlain Alexander Olsufyev; they married in 1891. Her memoirs of her family and of her life before marriage were published in the almanac “Rossiysky arkhiv” in 1999.

In summer he visited Abramtsevo, Savva Mamontov’s estate, with Repin. Both painted a little bridge there, each in his own way: Repin “On a Bridge in Abramtsevo” (1879), Levitsky “The Bridge in the Woods” (1885–1886). Levitsky travelled to Italy in 1885, 1896 and 1907 and painted genre scenes and landscapes there in the open air. In 1904 he painted the interior of the Church of the Saviour on-the-Vestibules in the Rostov Kremlin; the picture is in the Tretyakov Gallery.

His letters to Polenov survive. In a letter of 18 September 1869 he describes an academic exhibition where he liked the bust of Mikhail Mikeshin by Alexander Opekushin, then a little-known sculptor. He wrote about Arkhip Kuindzhi, who showed “View of St Isaac’s Cathedral”, with the same enthusiasm.

Leo Tolstoy stayed with the Levitskys at the Olsufyev estate of Nikolskoye near Moscow, by some accounts in February–March 1896 and 1897. In 1896 Levitsky drew him in profile while a novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz was read aloud; the sitting lasted an hour and a half. With Tolstoy’s permission the drawing was turned into an engraving, which was sold in shops. In May 1898 Tolstoy called on Levitsky again and stayed ten days. Levitsky’s father ran a studio in St Petersburg, and, by some accounts, after his death in 1898 Rafail carried on the business; in particular, portraits of the family of Nicholas II are attributed to him. The reliability of this information is doubtful. The place and date of his death are given differently in the sources: Leningrad in 1940 and Paris are named, while other accounts give only an approximate interval of about 1937–1940.