Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vladimir Borovikovsky was a Russian painter of Ukrainian Cossack origin, born on the 24th of July 1757 in Mirgorod. He dominated portraiture in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, creating roughly 500 portraits of imperial family members, courtiers, generals, and cultural figures.
Borovikovsky came to Saint Petersburg at the personal request of Empress Catherine the Great. His friend Vasily Kapnist asked him to paint two allegorical works for her rooms in Kremenchuk during her journey to Crimea, and the paintings pleased her enough that she summoned him to the capital after September 1788.
Borovikovsky worked in a fusion of classicist and sentimental styles. His chamber portraits are intimate in character and noted for conveying the inner life of sitters. His ceremonial portraits are distinguished by skilled rendering of textures such as velvet, satin, gilded vestments, and precious stones.
Because he was considered too old to attend the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts, Borovikovsky took private lessons from Dmitry Levitzky and later from Austrian painter Johann Baptist Lampi. He also lived for his first ten years in the city with Prince Nikolay Lvov, whose ideas strongly influenced his art.
His most notable portraits include the Portrait of Catherine II, Empress of Russia (1794), Portrait of M. I. Lopukhina (1797), Portrait of Paul I, Emperor of Russia (1800), and Portrait of Prince A. B. Kurakin (1801-1802), among others.
Vladimir Borovikovsky died suddenly of a heart attack on the 6th of April 1825. He was interred at the Lazarevskoe Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Saint Petersburg.