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RUSSIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE
THROUGH THE CENTURIES

 
 

I. M. Nikitin

 
 

I. M. Nikitin, 1688-1741, was one of those who received scholarship and went abroad to study. He successfully learned the western techniques of painting, and was quite able to give a penetrating psychological analysis of the persons he painted. His portraits favorably compare with those of good contemporary European painters. Peter the Great was proud of him, and mentioned Nikitin even to the King of Prussia as a proof that "Russia also has good painters." A quick glimpse at his portrait of Count Gavrilo Ivanovich Golovkin, the first Russian Chancellor, whom Nikitin painted in the seventeen-twenties, could fool even an experienced eye into thinking that it was borrowed from Versailles, so striking is the resemblance to French dignitaries. See Golovkin.
Another of Nikitin's successful portraits is the one of Peter the Great; his "Tree of the Romanov Dynasty," though it lacks originality. He obviously borrowed the idea form Ushakov and a few details from some other painters. Nikitin's career was interrupted after the death of Peter. He was one of the new Russian intellectuals who came out openly against foreign domination in the arts. Their persecution began during the reign of Anna Ioanovna, and in it, Count Ernst Johann Biron, the all-powerful favorite of the Empress, played the major role. A foreigner himself, Biron accused Peter's retainers of siding with Artemii Petrovich Volinskii (1689-1740), a statesman and leader of the party that fought strong German influence at the Russian court. Nikitin was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Elizabeth freed him but he died on the way back to Saint Petersburg. Other portraits by Nikitin are the series beginning with Peter I in his twenties ending with Peter I on his death bed, (1725, Russian Museum), the March, 1726 portrait of S.G. Stroganov (Russian Museum). The portrait "Napol'nogo Getmana," (Russian museum), the portrait G.I. Golovkin (beginning of the 18th century in the Tretyakov Gallery), and the portrait of Anna Petrovna, (of 1720 or thereafter, in the Tretyakov Gallery).

 
 

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