The most interesting thing about this child's portrait, in my view, is that the child is reading a primer, and he is three years old

The most interesting thing about this child's portrait, in my view, is that the child is reading a primer, and he is three years old. The count's son Ivan Alexeyevich Musin-Pushkin was painted by an unknown artist of the Yaroslavl school around 1786. The boy's attire also draws the eye: a lace shirt left open at the chest, in the manner of the romantic heroes of the late eighteenth century. Yet it is his thoughtful, grown-up gaze that makes the portrait atypical of children's likenesses. Everything indicates that little Vanya Musin-Pushkin was a clever and uncommon child. And it is with his sons, as it happens, that Leo Tolstoy would fall in love