Could Shevchenko have painted the portrait of Petro Dunin-Borkovsky?

Abstract

The publication of the art components of the 12-volume Complete Works stimulated further research into Shevchenko’s artistic heritage. There remains an urgent issue to identify several works as the ones belonging by Shevchenko’s brush. The proposed study’s subject is the authorship of the portrait of Petro Dunin-Borkovsky, the aim being to identify as accurately as possible the circumstances under which Shevchenko had the opportunity to paint the said picture, basing on which to prove or disprove (athetesis) his authorship. The achievement of this goal was facilitated by the use of traditional biographical methodology, in particular, the method of comparing the facts of the poet’s life with the epistolary records of his contemporaries.

The results. The article considers all the possible circumstances of the painting’s creation and its study history. It was acquired by the Taras Shevchenko State Museum (now the Taras Shevchenko National Museum) as Shevchenko’s work. However, in the10-volume Complete Works, the portrait was placed among the doubtful ones, while in the new academic collection it is presented in the main body of artistic works. Based on Varvara Repnina’s correspondence, the article describes in detail the acquaintance and possible meetings between Shevchenko and Dunin-Borkovsky. Varvara Repnina never mentioned the artist’s work on the portrait of Dunin-Borkovsky.

Vasyl Kasiyan believed that the portrait belonged to the brush by Dunin-Borkovsky’s wife, Hlafira Psol, but did not reason his opinion. Instead, Valentyna Ruban substantiated Shevchenko’s authorship, which the author of the article disagrees about, refuting some of her observations as subjective and arbitrary. Having studied the portrait of Dunin-Borkovsky, the experts from the National Scientific Research and Restoration Centre of Ukraine, together with Tetiana Kalinina, an employee of the Taras Shevchenko National Museum, also concluded that there are no grounds to attribute the portrait to Shevchenko.

The editors of the new academic edition did not have strong arguments in favour of Shevchenko’s authorship, so the work should have been placed at least among the questionable ones, if not rejected altogether. In fact, it has no place among Shevchenko’s paintings at all. Further research of Dunin-Borkovsky’s portrait as a work by Hlafira Psol in comparison with her other paintings, in particular the portrait of Varvara Repnina, seems promising.