Orenburg state university

OSU researcher has authenticated the authorship of a Hermitage painting

The painting “Portrait of a Boy from Terlikov Family” turned to belonged to the hand of Ivan Andreevich Kabanov (1823–1896), an artist from Orenburg. The picture has been stored in the Hermitage since 1946.

The last owner of the painting was Anna Vasilyevna Terlikova from a rich merchant family of Kovrigin and Terlikov. To save the family’s art collection, she opened the Museum of Merchant Life under the aegis of “Ancient St. Petersburg” community in 1923. But in 1924 the museum was closed. Its exhibits were impounded by the Soviet government and then distributed to different museums like the State Russian Museum, the Novgorod Museum-Reserve, the Taganrog Art Museum, etc. The “Portrait of a Boy from Tarlike Family” also had got to the USSR Museum of Ethnography and then to the Hermitage. The name of its author was lost.

Denis Denisov, OSU senior researcher from OSU South Ural History and Ethnography Research Institute, Candidate of Historical Sciences while collecting info for a biographical academic article about his compatriot, Ivan Andreevich Kabanov, an artist, made a discovery. The researcher found out from the Academy of Arts report that the painter had drawn two half-length portraits for Vasilii Ivanovich Terlikov in 1866–1867. He also studied the Museum of Merchant Life description, and it confirmed the authorship of the painting that now belongs to the Russian Paintings Collection of the Hermitage. The researcher has forwarded these findings to the Hermitage’s History of Russian Art Department.