Prince Troubetzkoy’s Children with Their Dog

There’s a painting in Milan’s Modern Art Gallery that quietly tells you everything about where Paul Troubetzkoy came from. Daniele Ranzoni painted it in 1874, and it shows three boys squeezed into the greenhouse at Villa Ada, the Troubetzkoy family’s home on Lake Maggiore, their dog wedged in among them. One of those boys, eight years old at the time, was Paul himself, decades before he became the sculptor who would model Tolstoy and Rodin and most of fashionable Paris. What stands out about this painting is how little it tries to impress anyone. The artist didn’t attempt to pose these children the way most portraitists posed children in 1874, stiff, composed, aware of being looked at. The boys simply peer out from the oval frame, a little cheeky, a little caught off guard, as though someone called their names right as the brush touched canvas. Their clothes barely register as clothes. The background gives almost nothing away, no real sense of depth or room. It reads less like a formal commission and more like a memory someone managed to catch before it slipped past. That looseness wasn’t incidental. Ranzoni’s bond with the family went well beyond the usual arrangement between painter and patron. He visited Villa Ada many times, taught the boys to swim, built them a puppet theatre. Through him, Troubetzkoy boys also came to know Tranquillo Cremona and the sculptor Giuseppe Grandi, and the three of them, in their different ways, helped shape the Scapigliatura, an artistic movement that developed after the Risorgimento Period (1815-71) in Italy. The movement pulled Milanese art away from bourgeois control and moved towards something rougher and more honest in their art. And these influences can be seen in Ranzoni’s portraits, where the loose brushwork and play of colours capture a fleeting moment on the canvas just as he intended.