(Milan 1864 - Charlottesville 1936)

 

In a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, datable to the summer of 1893, Oscar Wilde wrote from the Albemarle Club to his beloved “Bosie”, “My Dear Boy [...] I lunched with Prince Troubetzkoy and Mrs. Chanler this afternoon - He has done a lovely picture of her and would do a beautiful one of you. I talked to him about you. He is going down to the Batterseas to finish his portrait of Cyril but will be back in the autumn. You really must be painted, and also have an ivory statue executed.”¹

 

The childhood spent in this lively environment undoubtedly fostered Pierre’s artistic penchant from a young age – “Both my parents were devoted to art, and I cannot remember a time when I did not draw. My first serious piece of work was a portrait of myself done in oil and with the aid of a looking-glass, when I was nine years old”³ – but, although some sources report study trips to Paris and Munich,⁴ it is almost certain that his training took place in Milan with Ranzoni and Cremona and that the artist then moved directly to London.⁵ Despite this, Troubetzkoy preferred to consider himself self-taught – with much exaggerated modesty. “I have not studied at all – that is, in the ordinary sense of the word. I was taught drawing from the age of nine to twelve, but I have never spent my time in a studio or worked with any master.”

The move to England around 1891 marked the beginning of a brilliant career as a portraitist, which began with the showing of Study for a Portrait in the Open Air, painted earlier in Italy, at the New English Art Club⁶ and followed, as early as October 1892, by an exhibition at Dowdeswell’s Gallery in New Bond Street, which attracted immediate critical acclaim.

The decision to move to London instead of Paris – “[...] I believed that success, if acquired at all, would be more permanent in England than in France” – proved fruitful. From his atelierin Kensington, which was also used as an exhibition space and where every detail of the furniture revealed the refined and discreet taste of its owner, Troubetzkoy moved brilliantly among London’s high society, soon becoming one of the leading portrait painters and “[...] now I have more work than I can do”,⁷ as he declared in 1895. Among others, the portraits of Katherine Cavendish (1895, Chester Town Hall), the Marquess of Dufferin, Lord Warden (1892-1895, Dover Collection), and William Ewart Gladstone (c. 1890, National Gallery of Scotland) date from these years.

The almost definitive move to the United States saw the couple successfully settle for around two years in New York (although it is not excluded that they spent some time in London),¹² where Troubetzkoy had already held an exhibition in the autumn of 1897, and then from 1898 in Washington, where the painter had a studio in the Corcoran building. One of the artist’s best-known portraits, the elegant Alice Barney in Whites and Browns (1898, Smithsonian Art Museum), dates from this period. The fame of both – Amélie “[...] as successful in her literary work as her husband in his artistic career”¹³ – and Troubetzkoy’s cosmopolitan allure and frequentation of American high society having further increased, preceded by the great success achieved in England, saw ladies, industrialists, politicians and members of the most important American families commissioning their portraits from him.^14.

The artist’s interests, however, were not limited to painting alone. If, probably influenced by his wife to whom the work was dedicated, Troubetzkoy published his first book The Passer-By¹⁵ in 1908, of more interest is his closeness to the artists gravitating around the magazine “Camera Work”, as evidenced by the photograph the painter took of his wife Amélie, printed in collaboration with Alvin Langdon Coburn and which soon became part of Alfred Stieglitz’s collection.¹⁶

 

 

The portrait of the swordsman and his blade with a French handle is conceivably attributable to the artist’s London period or to the first months after his move to the United States (around 1892-1896). The rapid brushwork and the brilliant colour range fully reflect the artist’s Lombard training, accustomed to painting en plein air and still far from that compactness of brushstroke that Troubetzkoy would achieve more fully in the following decade when he would be decisively influenced by the work of one of the most famous portrait painters of the time, the Irishman John Lavery.

The stylistic closeness of this swordsman to such works as Summer Time (a portrait of Dorothy Sylvie Burnett, painted in July 1890) or The Skater (1895), a personal reworking of a similar painting by De Nittis,¹⁷ reveal the suggestions of certain styles of Italian painting, oscillating between an Impressionist and vaguely Divisionist lineage as already suggested by the critics: “Prince Troubetzkoy is an Impressionist of an advanced and vigorous type, influenced by Claude Monet, by the Italian Segantini, and others.”¹⁸

 

Paolo Troubetzkoy, Portrait of Pierre Troubetzkoy, 1911-1912

 

Paul Troubetzkoy, Portrait of Pierre Troubetzkoy 1911-1912 The physical resemblance of the figure to the portrait photos of Pierre, but above all to the portrait made of him by his sculptor brother Paul Troubetzkoy¹⁹ finally allows us to reasonably assume that the painting might be a self-portrait of the painter himself. This would also be confirmed by the spontaneity of the posture, decidedly far from the rigorous approach that characterized similar subjects²⁰ and the cut of the composition with the figure caught against the light as in a break during training. Moreover, it is known that Pierre was, among other things, a talented swordsman, as evidenced by a photograph taken by Amélie during the summer of 1894, where the artist “[...] is in fencing gear, his sabre and mask in hand, looking every inch the swashbuckling star that he was”²¹.

 

- Agnese Sferrazza.

---

 

NOTES:

¹ Some Letters from Oscar Wilde to Alfred Douglas 1892-1897, with illustrative Notes by Arthur C. Dennison, Jr. & Harrison Post and an Essay by A.S.W. Rosenbach, San Francisco 1924, p. xxi. For the dating of the letter, see the note on p. xxxvii.

² Margherita Sarfatti, Daniele Ranzoni, Rome 1935-XIII, p. 132. This work, one of Ranzoni’s best-known, was harshly criticized by Sarfatti, who accused him of “aristocratic affectations, good for astonishing the bourgeoisie” so much so that she also reported an envious joke by the master Cremona: “The dog is made by children, and the children by dogs” (El can l’è faa da fiœu, e i fiœu da can).

³ The work is published in Borgmeyer 1911, p. 322.

⁴ Artists and their Work, in “Munsey’s Magazine”, vol. XVI, February 1897, no 5, p. 318.

⁵ Borgmeyer 1911, pp. 327-328.

⁶  The work was an immediate critical success, as reported in the review on the pages of “The Standard” which emphasized the elegance of the figure “[...] painted with marvellous breadth and dexterity, vigorously drawn, and with a palpable swiftness. The varied contours of the gracefully posed head and neck are indicated with surprising firmness and expressive certainty of line”: see Borgmeyer 1912, no. 1, p. 2.

⁷ All of Troubetzkoy’s first-person quotations are taken from the interview published in December 1895 in “The Sketch”, cited in the bibliography.

⁸ Author of more than twenty works of fiction, collections of poetry and the verse drama Herod and Marianne (1889), Amélie Rives achieved enormous success with the public with the novel The Quick or the Dead? published in 1888. This novel, which tells the story of a young widow overwhelmed by erotic passion for her deceased husband’s cousin, was immediately condemned by the critics.

⁹ Postlethwaite 1894, p. 118.

¹⁰ Borgmeyer 1911, p. 335.

¹¹ Donna M. Lucey, Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, New York 2006.

¹² Artists and their Work, op. cit.

¹³ Magruder 1897.

¹⁴ Among the characters portrayed were the Astors, Roosevelts, and Whitneys. An extensive discussion of American portraits, accompanied by a long list of models portrayed by Troubetzkoy, is in Borgmeyer 1912, no. 2, pp. 73, 75.

¹⁵ The volume, which was to be published in 1907 by Grant Richards, saw the light of day the following year with Doubleday, Page & Company. “The Sketch – A Journal of Art and Actuality”, vol. LXIV, 1909.

¹⁶ Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz Collection.

¹⁷ De Nittis, La lezione di pattinaggio sul ghiaccio, 1875.

¹⁸ Borgmeyer 1912, no. 1, p. 14.

¹⁹  Paul Troubetzkoy, Portrait of Pierre Troubetzkoy, plaster, 1911-1912 (Landscape Museum, Verbania).

²⁰ See, for example, just to mention two famous examples, Antonio Mancini’s Portrait of Baron Caccamissi as a Swordsman (1901) or Gari Melchers’ The Fencing Master (c. 1900).

²¹ Lucey 2006.