The Portrait - review

Grand, LeedsLong before Wilde's Dorian Gray, there was Nikolai Gogol's The Portrait, about a comparable Faustian pact with a supernatural artwork. Gogol's painting is a portrait of a usurer, bought by an impoverished artist called Chartkov. He spends his last kopek on it, but is soon compensated when money miraculously starts to fall from its frame. Wealth, as we know, creates greed. Chartkov becomes a lucrative society portraitist, until awareness of wasted talents and compromised integrity pro...

Read full article Share article