The Eighteenth Century
"owned" by the refined and sympathetic Count N. P. Sheremetyev. We refer to Nicholas Argunov, the son and pupil of the above-mentioned Ivan Argunov. N. Argunov had no great pictorial gifts. Compared with the portraits of his less fortunate, but more talented colleagues: Shebanov, Drozhzhin, and Miropolsky, Argunov's paintings seem coarse, dry, dull. They have few purely pictorial merits—correct, careful, somewhat mechanical drawing, respectable vivacity of expression, but alongside these are very dull colours and very dull painting. Argunov methodically copied what he saw, and owing to this quiet regularity, his portraits have a value as historical documents. Some of them are invaluable for the history of costume. Others render with perfect accuracy the appearance of curious personalities of those times. First among these is the family of Count N. P. Sheremetyev and his poetical wife, the former singer in the Count's domestic opera, recruited from among the serfs. Argunov's best portraits are kept in Sheremetyev's estate, Kuskovo, near Moscow.
A word must be said, in closing, about Shchukin, after Borovikovsky, the most talented of Levitzky's pupils. In his first-rate Portrait of a Lady, in the Tretyakov Gallery, he reached high pictorial perfection and created one of the most picturesque works of the Russian School; his portrait of himself in the Academy of
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