Ever seen a Pushkin like this?

Ever seen a Pushkin like this? Not the most popular nor the most comprehensible of his portraits, usually called the "Linyov" portrait after an unidentified amateur artist, Ivan Logginovich Linyov. The authorship of this work, like its provenance, is enigmatic. Originally the portrait was signed simply "I.L."; later, after the Hermitage restoration at the end of the nineteenth century, it was for some reason attributed to a name known to no one, never recorded anywhere or by anyone. Nevertheless, the portrait, which dates from the first third of the nineteenth century and was handed down as an inheritance of no great value, before finally being presented to the Lyceum, has remained in history under the name "Linyov". Not much is written about it, but what is written is interesting: some hold that the dilettante artist did not flatter the poet's looks and, as it happens, preserved for posterity his true features without a grain of adulation, while others point to damage by clumsy restorers to a picture originally painted from sketches of the already dead Pushkin. None of the existing versions has any confirmation or weighty argument behind it, whether that Zhukovsky commissioned a portrait of his friend from his acquaintance, the retired General Linyov, and that Pushkin even agreed to sit for this "mug", or that the portrait was painted from the poet after the duel, or even as he lay in his coffin. All that is clear is that this really is a portrait of Pushkin, and we are free to believe or not in its likeness to his actual face. Enigmatic, but not without interest.