Dimitri Gregoriovitch Levitsky

Levitsky was born on 24 May 1735 (13 May, Old Style) in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire, the son of Hryhorii Levytsky, a priest and engraver who gave him his first artistic training. He first studied under the portrait painter Aleksey Antropov in Kyiv, when Antropov arrived to paint St. Andrew's Cathedral, and continued as his apprentice after relocating to St. Petersburg around 1758, until about 1762, assisting on church and secular decorative commissions.

In 1769 and 1770 he exhibited a group of portraits, including one of the Academy's director, Alexander Kokorinov, at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. The exhibition secured him the title of academician and, in 1771, appointment as head of the Academy's portrait painting division, a post he held until 1787 (one source gives 1788). Between about 1772 and 1776 he painted his best known cycle of works, portraits of the pupils, known as the "Smolyanki," at Catherine II's Smolny Institute for young noblewomen. He went on to paint the Empress herself and many of the leading aristocratic and cultural figures of her court, work that later reference sources describe as capturing "the ideals of the Enlightenment in the Russian Empire."

Levitsky died on 16 April 1822 (4 April, Old Style) in St. Petersburg. One biographical source describes him as dying in poverty after his court commissions declined in his later years.

Standard reference works place Levitsky at the top of his period. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes him as "the foremost portraitist of the era of Catherine the Great and conveyor of the ideals of the Enlightenment in the Russian Empire." Other standard art historical and museum references, including the State Russian Museum and the Web Gallery of Art, similarly describe him as a leading figure among eighteenth century Russian portrait painters. These assessments come from encyclopedic and museum reference sources rather than from signed contemporary criticism; no verbatim quotation from a named critic in a dated, major outlet beyond Britannica could be confirmed for this profile.

The auction market records this artist under several transliterated forms, including "Dimitri Gregoriovitch Levitsky" (Artnet) and "Dimitri Levitzky" (MutualArt), both of which refer to the same painter documented in encyclopedic sources as Dmitry Grigoryevich Levitsky. A confirmed, independently verified realized price, house, and date for the artist's all time auction record could not be established from the sources reviewed for this profile. Specialist Russian art auction houses, including MacDougall's, have offered his work with presale estimates in the high six figures to low millions of pounds, for example a Portrait of Empress Catherine the Great estimated at GBP 800,000 to 1,200,000, though an estimate is not a realized sale price. Public sale volume for the artist appears limited, consistent with an 18th century court painter whose surviving output is largely concentrated in Russian state museum collections.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Levitsky, and attribution for individual works rests on museum scholarship, principally the State Russian Museum, and on standard art-historical references. Some auction listings for less securely documented works are catalogued as "attributed to" rather than fully attributed, so provenance and condition of documentation matter more than usual for a painter of this period. No contemporary gallery or estate currently represents the artist; works reach the market almost exclusively through major auction houses, and the bulk of his known output remains in Russian state museum collections rather than in private or commercial circulation. Given the small and unconfirmed public sale record for this artist, any auction result reported elsewhere should be treated with particular caution until it can be traced to a verifiable sale listing.