Fyodor Tolstoy came from the
Tolstoy family. His father Count Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy, governed a ministry of war supplies. Tolstoy early began to paint under the direction of his mother, Elizabeth Barbot-de-Marni. His first drawings, which are now stored in the
Tretyakov Gallery, were made when he was 4 years old. At the age of nine he went to the
foster care of his rich and influential cousin, Count
Pyotr Aleksandrovich Tolstoy. 's "Oath of the Horatii" and to the ceramics of
Josiah Wedgwood. A year later, Fyodor entered the
Jesuit College in Polotsk. Here, he studied painting, as well as the sciences. Upon his accession to the throne, Emperor
Paul I summoned Pyotr Tolstoy to
Saint Petersburg, and Fyodor Petrovich returned to his parents. At the same time, his father was fired, and the family's circumstances deteriorated. From June 1798 to June 1802, Fyodor Petrovich was educated in the
Naval Cadet Corps. After finishing, he continued his education under the direction of famous scientists. He studied
mathematics,
astronomy,
political economy,
zoology,
archaeology and
numismatics. He also frequented the riding academy, and became a dashing horseman. In this time, without any supervision, he painted
still lives,
portraits and
landscapes. After his father showed him a
cameo depicting
Napoleon, he started to learn the art of the medallist. Tolstoy visited the Imperial Academy of Arts' classes of plastic arts. One of his teachers was the most fashionable Russian portraitist of the time,
Orest Kiprensky. In 1804, Fyodor Tolstoy was appointed an
adjutant of Admiral
Pavel Chichagov, and was forced to retire. From 1806 he worked in the
Hermitage Museum. In 1806, he painted the
Confidence of Alexander of Macedon to doctor Philippos, the
Judgement of Paris, the
Labours of Hercules, etc. For his wax
bas-relief the
Triumphal entrance of Alexander of Macedon into Babylon (1809, now in the Hermitage Museum), Tolstoy was elected an honorable member of the Academy of Arts. , St. Petersburg Starting 23 September 1810 he worked in the Department of the Mint and became the founder of medal working in
Russia. After the
battle of Leipzig, he began a series of
twenty-four medallions, devoted to the major battles of the
Napoleonic Wars. Tolstoy's medallions acquired wide reputation not only in Russia, but also abroad. He was elected a member of almost all the European academies of fine arts. In 1861, he made his last medal, dedicated to the
emancipation of the serfs. From 1820 to 1833, he employed the
Neoclassical technique of "raw sketch," or refined outline drawings without shading and hatchwork, to execute 63 illustrations for the
Dushenka of
Ippolit Bogdanovich. As regards painting, Tolstoy specialized in interior scenes, full of symmetrical lines and Neoclassical statuary. His
Family Portrait (1830) "betrays a Romantic fascination with both psychological detail and tricks of lighting, perspective, and frames". In 1816, he became involved in
freemasonry, eventually participating in the organization of the so-called "
Lancasterian schools," designed to propagate literacy. Although he was close to the founding fathers of the
Decembrist societies, Tolstoy did not participate in their unsuccessful revolt. In 1826, he wrote two treatises for
Nicholas I,
About the moral state of troops of Russia and
About the state of the Russian Empire in connection to its internal organization, in which he proposed a series of legislative, social and tax reforms. In 1838, Tolstoy composed the ballet
The Aeolian Harp. He wrote the
libretto, carried out sketches for costumes, and, in more than sixty pictures, determined the choreography. In 1842, he composed a second ballet, based on Greek myth,
Echo. Unfortunately, neither of them was mounted. In 1843 his daughter
Ekaterina Fedorovna Tolstaya was born. She would become a painter and marry Professor Eduard Junge.
Pushkin, who regarded Tolstoy as the finest of contemporary Russian artists, referred to him, not surprisingly, in his novel
Eugene Onegin. In an 1825 letter to his brother, Pushkin asked him to procure a
vignette for the new edition of his poems: "What about having it done by Tolstoy's magic brush?
No - too expensive, but how terrifically sweet" (the last line is taken from
Ivan Dmitriev's fable "The Fashionable Woman"). ==References==