Abstract In 1757, the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was founded in St Petersburg to professionalize painting, sculpture, and architecture, and to further the careers of Russian artists in all three disciplines. While the Academy’s early champions relied on western European artists to galvanize local developments, they also harboured ambivalent attitudes towards foreign involvement in Russian artistic affairs. This article traces the resulting web of conflicting loyalties and aspirations which underpinned, but also complicated, Russia’s quest to create a body of art which it could call its own. It then attends to the ways in which the portraitists Dmitry Levitsky and Vladimir Borovikovsky both interacted with and set themselves apart from western European practice. Rethinking Russian painting in this way as a critical component of a European mainstream sheds light on the realisation (or otherwise) of a national school of art.