Portrait of Leo Tolstoy as a Ploughman on a Field

A portrait that borrows a job

The title does the framing itself, and it does it with two words: as a. A named man is being shown in the character of a ploughman on a field. That construction tells you the labour in the picture is a costume for the sitter, whatever it may be for the animal. The plough team's function is not in doubt — pulling a plough is the oldest and least ambiguous job in this register — but the man behind it is identified by a name rather than by the work, which is precisely what an ordinary picture of ploughing does not do.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1887 as the date of creation and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow as the location, one of seven works in this register recorded there. The dimensions are 28 x 40 cm, which is very small for a portrait of a named sitter and much closer to the scale of a study. Realism is the style term and Russian the nationality attached to the painter. The categories are landscape, rural and Animal Art > Horse, and the measured colour family of the image is red.

Scale, read against the register

The mounted portraits catalogued here run to two and three metres. A named sitter at 28 x 40 cm, behind a plough rather than above a saddle, is the opposite end of the same tradition, and the dimensions alone carry most of that argument.