Dmitri Grigorievitch Levitski

Levitski was born in 1735 in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire and now Kyiv, Ukraine. Sources agree on the year and place of his birth but disagree on the exact day, so no single birth date can be stated with confidence. His father, Grigory Levitsky, was a priest and amateur engraver who gave him his first art instruction. Around 1758 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he apprenticed under the portraitist Aleksey Antropov until about 1762 and also studied with the decorative painter Giuseppe Valeriani.

His reputation grew through the Imperial Academy of Arts. Portraits exhibited in 1769, including one of the architect A. F. Kokorinov, earned him the designation of academician in 1770. From 1771 to 1787 he headed the Academy's portrait class, and he is recorded as a member of the Academy's governing council. During this period he painted many of the leading figures of Catherine II's court, including the empress herself.

Levitski died in St. Petersburg. The most commonly cited date, reconciling the Julian and Gregorian calendars used at the time, is 4 April 1822 (Old Style) or 16 April 1822 (New Style); reference sources vary slightly on the precise day, though all agree on April 1822 and St. Petersburg as the place of death. He is reported to have died at his home on Vasilievsky Island and to have been buried at the Smolensk Orthodox Cemetery in St. Petersburg, a grave that at least one source states was later lost; an older biographical dictionary instead records the burial place as unknown, so this detail is not fully settled.

Standard reference sources are consistent in placing Levitski at the top of 18th-century Russian portraiture. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes him as the foremost portraitist of the era of Catherine the Great, and Russian-language encyclopedic sources similarly describe him as one of the outstanding Russian portraitists of the second half of the 18th century. No exact, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in the available research, so none is reproduced here; the assessments above come from unsigned encyclopedic and museum reference entries rather than individually authored criticism.

Levitski's market is defined by scarcity rather than volume. The clearest sourced auction result is a painting attributed to Levitski that reportedly sold at Christie's London for GBP 862,000, close to a reported upper estimate of GBP 900,000. This figure comes from a single identified press report (TASS), which gives the sale day only as "Monday, June 7" without stating the year, and the exact work title has not been confirmed in the available source material. Other public aggregators, such as Artsy's artist page, do not provide a clearly sorted list of realized prices sufficient to confirm a specific top result, underscoring how limited public sale data is for this artist. Given the age of the work and the small number of pieces that come to market, any individual sale result should be read as a data point from a thin market rather than a stable price trend.

Levitski has been deceased since 1822, and there is no current gallery or estate representation to speak of; his work is held almost entirely by major public museums, including the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, and the State Hermitage Museum, with additional works reported at institutions such as the National Museum in Warsaw, Hillwood Estate, the National Gallery of Armenia, and the Kyiv National Picture Gallery. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed, so provenance and comparison with securely documented museum holdings are the practical basis for authentication. The single most-cited high auction result, GBP 862,000 at Christie's London, rests on one identified press source with an unconfirmed sale date and work title, so it should be treated as indicative rather than definitive. Collectors should expect infrequent supply, reliance on specialist Russian and Old Master sales, and a market history that is still thinly documented in public sources.