The Eighteenth Century
ficer and an amateur artist at the time—during her famous Crimean "progress" in 1787. The success of his first attempts led the young man to come to Petrograd. But there he found entirely different surroundings, entirely different tastes from those which reigned when Levitzky had moved to the capital. The imitation of the warmth and richness of the old Venetian masters, which lay back of all of Levitzky's models, was now replaced by an infatuation for classical reserve and grandeur. Highly coloured dresses, picturesque hair-dressing, gorgeous combinations of gauze, tinsel and spangle, had gradually disappeared. Fortunately, Borovikovsky had the advantage of being in his early youth a pupil of Levitzky, the guardian of the old traditions. Owing to this circumstance, and also to the fact that Borovikovsky did not get into the Academy, he formed for himself, and preserved, that rich manner of painting and that picturesque design that redeem in his pictures the defects of his times: a certain coldness and stiffness, and also monotony.
Sometimes, however, this stiffness disappeared completely, and then Borovikovsky showed all his Southern good-nature, coupled with such a delicate understanding of life and beauty that these, unfortunately few examples of his work, are on the same level with the best portraits of Levitzky. Among these masterpieces the
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