The painting came to the museum from the collection of tsarist major general Nikolai Yermolov and, for a long time, was considered one of two lifetime portraits of the leader of the uprising. Researchers have suggested that it was painted by an artist from among Pugachev's followers, possibly an Old Believer icon painter. This is also indicated by the inscription on the canvas: "Yemelyan Pugachev is from the Cossack village of our Orthodox faith and belongs to that faith, Ivan son Prokhorov. This face was painted on September 21, 1773."
The first “alarm bell” sounded in 1925: restorers washed away part of the background and discovered under the image of Pugachev… a portrait of a court lady. Art historians assumed that this was Catherine II, the rebel’s main enemy. In the 1980s, during another restoration, they decided to examine the painting using X-rays. And they discovered that the technique of painting the portrait and the paints it was painted with appeared only in the first half of the 19th century. In addition, they established that the female portrait was just an image of a certain court lady.
That’s how the portrait of the impostor tsar turned out to be a total fake.
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