Portrait of Maria Ivanovna Lopukhina

Borovikovsky painted Maria Lopukhina in 1797, the year she married, when she was about 18. He set her in the soft, dreamy manner then in fashion in Russia, leaning against a rail with a wistful, faraway look, birches and cornflowers behind her. She did not live long — she died of consumption within a few years, in her early twenties. That early death gave the portrait a strange afterlife. A superstition grew up that the painting could bring illness to young women who gazed at it too long, until the collector Pavel Tretyakov bought it for his Moscow gallery and the story faded. Decades later the poet Yakov Polonsky wrote a few lines to it, saying that Borovikovsky had saved her beauty when everything else about her had passed.