(1735–1808). Russian portrait painter. Of peasant stock, he may have trained in St Petersburg with the court painter Pietro Rotari (1707–62), from whom he would have learned the Frenchified international style of fashionable portraiture, that made him one of the most successful native-born artists of the 18th century. His portraits of the Russian nobility range from his rather stiff state portrait of Catherine the Great (1763; St Petersburg, Pavlovsk Palace) to such charming and informal works as Barbara Novosiltseva (1780; Moscow, Tretyakov Gal.), which could stand comparison with similar works by Drouais and Vigée-Lebrun.
From The Oxford Companion to Western Art in Oxford Reference.