Before us is a picturesque portrait of thirty-five-year-old Ekaterina Sergeevna Avdulina, the wife of General AN Avdulin, a wealthy patron, a member of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. It is depicted against the background of a window with swirling clouds behind it and with a branch of a hyacinth in a glass. Usually, Kiprensky resorted to allegory in a portrait using, for example, plants.
And what did the artist want to tell the viewer in this portrait? Is it that life, personified by clouds, is passing by, and a woman is henceforth destined to grow old in the four walls of the home monastery, which, perhaps, is somewhat straightforwardly told by the crumbling and fading petals of the hyacinth? Does it contain a hint of some hidden reasons for the spiritual unsettledness of this still young woman sitting in a chair in some dull, stagnant pose and surrendering to sadness? ..
We do not know how General Avdulina is saddened, as contemporaries did not know, and why, however, the image does not acquire a halo of mystery, does not evoke either sympathy or a burning desire to penetrate into the inner world of this woman, for her small head with inexpressive eyes and minutely pinched sponges, in fact, nothing interesting and promises to reward curiosity for her thoughts and worries.
The look involuntarily distracts in the picture of the particular – beautifully transferred thin skin of the face, neck and hands, patterns of the shawl worn over the shoulders, necklace and bracelets on the hands and, of course, extremely expressive hands written on which each vein is visible. In a word, something happened that always happened when Oreste painted a portrait of an ordinary, boring, uninteresting person who can not inspire the creation of a truly spiritualized image.
(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)