Portrait of Anna Akhmatova

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: private collection.

Often, very concise portraits by Annenkov demonstrate a certain “formula” of the general image and the face of the model. There is a lot of doom and sorrow in the portrait of Akhmatova (it is in the collection of the Pushkin All-Russian museum. According to E. Zamyatin, this is a “portrait of Akhmatova’s eyebrows”, from which light and heavy shadows “creep” over her face. They are like a key in a music play: you hear what the mourning of hair, eyes and rosary on the crest say.” The same impression can be referred to its colourful copy. Remembering the sessions with the poet, the author wrote that she seemed to him “a sad beauty, a modest hermit, dressed up in a fashionable dress of a secular woman.” The work was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2013 for $ 1.380 million.