Anthelme François Lagrenée, Portrait of a Second Captain in the Russian Imperial Horse Guards, ca. 1827

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Anthelme François Lagrenée, Portrait of a Second Captain in the Russian Imperial Horse Guards, ca. 1827,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 1, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.2316.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Anthelme François Lagrenée, Portrait of a Second Captain in the Russian Imperial Horse Guards, ca. 1827,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 1, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.2316.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

In 1823, the French painter Anthelme François Lagrenée traveled to Russia, where he painted this miniature of a young officer. Lagrenée was well connected to the Russian court; his late father and teacher, Louis Jean François Lagrenée (1725–1805), had served as court painter to Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709–1762) and director of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.¹ Upon arriving at an imperial court that was infatuated with all things French, Lagrenée quickly found favor, painting the family of Alexander I (1777–1825) and members of his retinue.

Lagrenée is generally thought to have spent about two years in Russia,² but recent analysis of the miniature indicates that it was painted as late as 1827,³ suggesting that he remained longer than was previously believed, or he may have traveled back to Russia after his initial visit.⁴ The sitter’s distinctive uniform, which includes a black coat with silver piping and silver buttons, a high-necked red collar with silver braid, a silver aiguillette, and silver epaulettes, identifies him as an officer in the Imperial Guard, an elite military unit that served as personal guards for the Tsar.⁵ The four gold stars on his epaulettes indicate that he was a second captain. The particular design of the epaulettes was not issued until an imperial order on January 1, 1827, enabling the miniature to be dated to about 1827.⁶ It was common for noble Russian families to add their sons to the officers’ lists from birth, suggesting that this sitter is of aristocratic ancestry.⁷ Beneath his collar, he probably wears a black leather stock, a stiff and constricting piece of hide, indicating that he was a cavalry officer.⁸ Leather stocks were designed to protect the neck from saber slashes while the wearer was on horseback, but their height and rigidity also had the added benefit of improving the posture and raising the chin for a poised military bearing.

Lagrenée’s careful, meticulous rendering of details such as the richly embossed silver epaulettes could be ascribed to his own military background. He began dabbling in miniature painting after he joined the French army in 1793, but the success of his miniature portraits during his Russian sojourn led him to transition entirely to painting miniatures until his death in Paris in 1832.⁹ Lagrenée employed various tricks of the trade in this miniature, including using a playing card to stabilize the ivory support and fit it securely into the case—a technique that harks back to the earliest days of miniature painting.¹⁰ He also placed an oval piece of silver foil behind the sitter’s face to amplify the luminosity of the flesh tones.

in the nineteenth century. The ouroboros, a snake holding its tail in its mouth, was an ancient symbol of eternity that, by the 1820s, had come to represent everlasting love.¹¹ One can imagine a young officer commissioning this lavish gift of his own dashing portrait for a fiancée, wife, or sweetheart in the hope that she would wear it clasped to her wrist, keeping him in her thoughts during his absence.

Notes

1. Nathalie Lemoine-Bouchard, Les Peintres en Miniature 1650–1850 (Paris: Les éditions de l’Amateur, 2008), 321.

2. See for example, “Lagrenée, Anthelme François,” Benezit Dictionary of Artists, October 31, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.article.B00103063.

3. We are grateful to Dimitri Gorshkoff, who wrote in a message to Bernd Pappe on July 30, 2023, that the sitter was an aide-de-camp attached to the cavalry of the Russian guard (état-major of the cavalry of the guard, regiments of dragoons, hussars or chasseurs à cheval). Correspondence in NAMA curatorial files, 2023.

4. It is also possible that Lagrenée painted this Russian sitter during a visit to France.

5. According to Dimitri Gorshkoff, this uniform was established on May 1, 1817. NAMA curatorial files, 2023.

6. Charles Samuel Jerram, The Armies of the World (New York: New Amsterdam, 1900), 267. According to Dimitri Gorshkoff, “the epaulettes of the second captain (capitaine en second, Stabsrittmeister)” were established by an imperial order dated January 1, 1827. NAMA curatorial files, 2023.

7. Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldier’s Revolt: March–April, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1:7.

8. The Horse Guards were among the most aristocratic regiments of the Imperial Guards; see Dominic Lieven, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, Imperial Russia, 1689–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 233. Slightly later examples of Imperial Horse Guards uniforms are extensively illustrated in the Album of the Imperial Horse Guards, 1846–1849, Institut of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), St. Petersburg.

9. Lemoine-Bouchard, Les Peintres en Miniature, 321.

10. On the use of playing cards in early miniatures, see Karin Leonhard, “Game of Thrones: Early Modern Playing Cards and Portrait Miniature Painting,” British Art Studies, no. 17 (September 2020): https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-17/kleonhard.

11. For example, see Ginny Redington Dawes and Olivia Collings, Georgian Jewellery (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 2018), 139.

Given anonymously to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, by 1988 [1].

Notes

[1] The bracelet was discovered in a collections inventory in 1988. It was publicly advertised in the Kansas City Star in 2009 as abandoned property with no claims.