Count Mikhail Tarielovich Loris-Melikov

Description

A portrait such as this asserts itself at close range, the kind of scale that keeps a viewer standing rather than glancing in passing. The proportions are those of official portraiture, upright and contained, built to hold a wall where a serious eye will spend time on the surface rather than the story. In front of it, the sitter commands the space in a way that reproduction on a smaller scale would flatten.

About Count Mikhail Tarielovich Loris-Melikov

Count Mikhail Tarielovich Loris-Melikov sits for Ivan Aivazovsky with the bearing of a man accustomed to official record, and the composition gives him nothing to compete with. Background elements are pared back deliberately, so that uniform, posture and expression carry the entire weight of the image. The gravity is not theatrical; it is administrative, precise, the gravity of a subject who has sat for portraits before and knows how to hold still for them.

Aivazovsky built his reputation on the sea, on the way light breaks across water and disperses into weather, and something of that discipline survives here even though the subject could not be further from a marine canvas. The palette is cooler, more restrained, the tonal range narrower and more controlled than in his coastal scenes. Brushwork models the face and the fabric of the uniform with the same patient attention to surface he gave to foam and cloud, proof that his handling of light was never limited to open water, only most famously demonstrated there.

The hand-painted reproduction

A hand-painted oil painting reproduction of this portrait is built the same way the original was, layer by layer in oil on canvas, by a professional artist trained to match palette, tonal balance and the visible texture of brushwork rather than to imitate it flatly. This is a handmade oil painting, worked by hand until the surface carries the same quiet density of pigment that gives portraiture of this kind its sense of presence, not a print standing in for one. What holds attention in the original, the discipline of tone and the unshowy authority of the sitter, survives intact when the work is painted rather than reproduced mechanically, which is exactly what makes owning a painted version of something already a century and a half old worth the difference.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, not a printed reproduction
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your wall
• Gallery-ready presentation on arrival
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Free worldwide shipping, with no shipping charge to any country