Almost nothing is known for certain about the first twenty years of Fyodor Rokotov's life. Some sources call him a serf peasant from the village of Vorontsovo near Moscow who bought his freedom; others, the illegitimate son of a nobleman. The dispute remains unsettled even today. One thing is clear: somewhere around the turn of the 1750s the young artist was noticed by Count Ivan Shuvalov — favorite of Empress Elizabeth, founder of Moscow University and of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Through Shuvalov the young man painted a portrait of the heir to the throne, the future Peter III — and in 1760, at his patron's personal request, was admitted to the Academy.
His rise proved rapid. In 1762, having presented a portrait of Peter III, who had just ascended the throne, Rokotov received the title of court painter. A year later he painted the coronation portrait of Catherine II — by some accounts, the first among Russian artists to be granted such an honor. The image became the empress's official likeness: in 1766, by order of the College of Foreign Affairs, Rokotov made six more repetitions of it — for the Russian embassies abroad.
At the height of his success he did something that seemed to his contemporaries almost inexplicable: he left brilliant St. Petersburg and moved to provincial Moscow. There he did not fade but, on the contrary, found his true voice — becoming the leading portraitist of the Moscow nobility and working prolifically, with enthusiasm, heedless of the fashion of the capital. Over his Moscow decades hundreds of clients passed through his studio — whole families of the Russian gentry, whose faces are known to us today almost exclusively from his canvases.
It was in Moscow that the recognizable "Rokotov gaze" took shape: his sitters rarely look straight ahead, often turned half away, their eyes unfocused or directed past the viewer, as if their attention were drifting off to the side. The soft, almost smoky modeling of the face blurs the sharp outlines of the features. This is not a ceremonial report of the sitter's status but rather a hint of an inner life that the viewer must complete for himself — a rarity for the Russian portrait of the eighteenth century, where a firm, declarative pose was far more usual.
The summit of this method was the portrait of Alexandra Struyskaya (1772) — a young woman from a family the artist knew personally. The eighteen-year-old subject on the canvas looks off to one side, her half-smile barely perceptible, her gaze seeming at once clear and impenetrable. The picture would later be called "the Russian Mona Lisa."
The canvas outlived both its subject and its painter by two centuries. In the twentieth century the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, gazing at the portrait, would write: "I love your eyes, my friend..." — his poem The Portrait would make the face on the old canvas familiar to far more people than during Rokotov's own lifetime.
Rokotov died in Moscow in 1808. He remained a man without a clear biography: the exact date and circumstances of his birth are unknown, and little testimony about his character has survived. But the gaze he devised for dozens of other people's faces — elusive, questioning, resistant to any direct reading — outlived all the gaps in the archives and proved more eloquent than any document.