Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev. 1904 Valentin Serov (1865-1911)

Description of Valentin Serov’s painting "Portrait of S. P. Diaghilev".

This painting by Valentin Serov depicts Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, an outstanding figure of Russian culture, organizer of many exhibitions and operas, including one in Paris, and creator of the literary magazine World of Art.

This portrait Serov began to paint in 1904, but the artist’s interest in the picture rather quickly disappeared. That’s why the image is unfinished, but the main details, the position of the body of the poser, the backdrop is started. We can see that the painter managed to depict only some of Diaghilev’s body parts: the face and the right hand are well-drawn. Thanks to this drawing we can understand that in front of us a man in a sitting pose, he is about 30 years old. His head is slightly bent to the right. It seems that the man has been propping his head with his right hand for a very long time. But someone distracted Diaghilev. He pulled his hand away from his face, and the artist seems to have had time to capture this fleeting moment.

The poseur is portrayed as a bit pensive and irritated. He clearly didn’t like being plucked from his own thoughts. He has black, thick, literally tarred hair, deep set eyes, wide dark eyebrows, and a neatly trimmed mustache. Diaghilev is wearing a purple-pink coat.

You can see that the artist did not draw the hair to the end, so the bangs look pale, almost merges with the scalp. Such incompleteness adds romanticism and mystery to the picture. It is known that the painting was created right in Diaghilev’s apartment, where there used to be an editorial office of Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) magazine. So, judging by the background of the canvas, with this painting we can find out what color the walls in the apartment of the famous impresario were.

In the unfinished part of the painting we see only lines, an outline, along which the artist was to continue working on the portrait in the future.