Ladies-in-waiting in waiting: picturing adolescence in Dmitry Levitsky's Smolny Portraits, 1772-76

• Autores: Rosalind P. Blakesley
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 37, Nº. 1, 2014, págs. 10-37
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • From 1772-76, the Russian artist Dmitry Levitsky produced seven portraits of girls at the Smolny Institute, Russia's first state-sponsored boarding school for girls which Catherine the Great has founded in 1764. Drawing on a range of texts, from state edicts and educational treatises to conduct guidance and personal correspondence, this essay argues that these portraits offer one of the most sustained visual explorations of teenage girls in eighteenth-century Europe, and contributed to the very formation of a Russian consciousness of female adolescence. In conversation with Western European practice but also drawing on Ukrainian precedent, the painter brought together a number of discourses in a complex cultural arena, and refreshed a much broarder genre of female portraiture in Britain and France which had yet to attend so carefully to the complexities of the adolescent stage of life.