I've been unable to find very much on the life of this handsome Prince Gorchakov. Born on 17 September 1875 in Vaud, Switzerland, he was the third son of Prince Konstantin Alexandrovich Gorchakov - Russian ambassador to, variously, Switzerland, Saxony, and Spain - and Princess Maria Mikhailovna Sturdza. In 1904 - the year this portrait was painted - he married Daria Mikhailovna Bibikova (1883-1962), a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Fighting in World War I, he was seriously wounded at the front and died in a St. Petersburg hospital from his injuries on 18 March 1916 at the age of only forty. He was buried in the cemetery of the monastery of St. John of Kronstadt.
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Nikolai Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky (1868–1945), Russian painter whose work consists mainly of portraits, genre paintings, and landscapes. Born in the village of Shitiki in the Smolensk region, he studied art at the Semyon Rachinsky fine art school, icon-painting at the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra in 1883, modern painting at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1884 to 1889, and at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1894 to 1895. He later worked with studios in Paris. Active in St. Petersburg, he was a member of several prominent societies and became pedagogue and academician in 1903; he was an active
Member of the Academy of Arts. After 1921, he worked and lived exclusively in Riga, Latvia. He died at the end of World War II, in Berlin.
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| Also by Bogdanov-Belsky, and elsewhere labeled a portrait of the prince's wife, family descendants claim it portrays his sister, Elena, Princess Gorchakova, 1903. |
