Portrait of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna by Georg Kaspar von Prenner (1754, State Tretyakov gallery) and European Tradition of Portraits in Flower Wreath

Abstract

an Austrian painter active in Russia in 1750-1755, is among those artists of Rossica whose works, though broadly known, are so far insufficiently studied. There are only very short introductory entries on him in 18 th -beginning of the 20 thcentury dictionaries [15, p. 1163-1164; 45, pp. 378-379; 40, p. 428], some do not mention his stay in Russia at all [31, p. 43]. The most comprehensive biography of him as well as the list of his works is provided by J. H. M. Ernesti and F. C. G. Hirsching (1806) [9, pp. 71-82]. However, his Russian period is only very briefly described by them. N. N. Vrangel, A. N. Benois, E. Gollerbach, providing only concise information about the artist, mention a group portrait by Prenner, in which he, according to Benois, depicted himself portraying Ekaterina, then Grand Duchess, with her son Pavel [49, p. 38; 6, p. 15; 17, p. 26]. In "Russian Academic Artistic School in the 18 th Century" edited by S. P. Iaremich the models are identified as Anna Leopol' dovna with Ioann Antonovich and the artist depicted and creator of the painting as Louis Caravaque (1934) [50, p. 15], the attribution was preserved in a recent publication by I. Artemieva (1998) [3, p. 98] 2 .The research study of Prenner was for the first time undertaken by V. Makarov (1929). In his brochure an overview of Prenner's biography, not fully comprehensive, but still detailed, is complemented by description of his works from Gatchina palace-museum which then possessed the largest collection of his portraits (7 art works). Makarov severely criticizes the style of the artist: "a master deprived of a school, he adopted just a couple of composi-1