Portrait Of A Gentleman 1923

Boris Grigoriev painted this Portrait of a Gentleman with oils, sometime around 1923. It’s a painting where muted colours are built up, layer on layer, with short brushstrokes. You can see the process of making, the doing, still visible on the canvas. There’s a fascinating tension in the paint handling. The way the jacket is built up, almost like geometric planes, is set against the softer, blended treatment of the face. I keep looking at the corner of the sitter’s left eye, where a tiny, almost imperceptible dab of white paint catches the light. It is a simple, pure mark, but it animates the whole face, giving it a flicker of life. It’s these small painterly details that really make the painting sing, and show Grigoriev’s skill as a portraitist. It reminds me of some of the portraits by Cezanne, especially in the way Grigoriev uses planes of colour to build up form. But where Cezanne is all about structure and analysis, Grigoriev is more interested in capturing a fleeting moment of human presence. And that little dab of white paint, well, it’s like a tiny spark of recognition between the artist and his sitter.