This portrait, after a lost original by Jean-Louis Voille, painted in 1789, became the standard image of Emperor Paul I, the only son of Catherine the Great and Peter III. It served as a model for artists both before and after his coronation in 1797, and numerous versions were produced. Paul is dressed in the dark green uniform of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, with the stars of the Orders of St Andrew and St Alexander Nevskii, and the neck badges of the Order of Malta and St Anne. The presence of the white enamelled Order of Malta, of which Paul became Grand Master in 1798, suggests the work was completed in the latter years of the eighteenth century. The portrait appears to be a fine copy, and the presence of a dark red ground suggests an artist who trained in France or who was close to Voille.

Raised for the first seven years of his life by his great-aunt, the Empress Elizabeth, Paul was a sensitive, intelligent child. The effect of his father’s forced abdication and murder, coupled with his mother’s rejection of him, may have led to an unstable personality, and elements of fragility can be perceived in this portrait.

Jean-Louis Voille was born in Paris and studied under the portrait painter François-Hubert Drouais (1727–75). From the early 1770s he worked in Russia, where, around 1780, he was appointed court painter to the heir to the throne. In the mid- 1790s he returned to France.

A further contemporary copy of the painting, inscribed and dated Kapal JEpke. 1799, is recorded hanging in Carlton House in 1816 (RCIN 405730).

Text adapted from Russia: Art, Royalty & the Romanovs, London, 2018