The most famous and often reproduced image of Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky from the 1840s was a portrait painted in 1843 in Dusseldorf by the German artist Ferdinand Theodor Hildebrandt. In this image, the sixty-year-old poet is depicted in three quarters, with the Order of St. Anna 1st Class on the right side of his chest. A copy of the original Hildebrandt’s portrait from the Pushkin House collection was probably commissioned by the Second Branch of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the early 1850s, after the death of Vasily Zhukovsky. In 1925, at the initiative of the bibliographer and Pushkin scholar Boris Modzalevsky, the portrait was transferred to the Pushkin House.

On the poet’s ring finger, he wears Alexander Pushkin’s talisman ring. In a letter dated July 20, 1837, Zhukovsky describes it as follows,

The ring was presented to Pushkin by Yelizaveta Ksaveryevna Vorontsova, when he departed from Odessa on August 1, 1824. The ring was a large twisted gold band with a large octagonal carnelian stone of a reddish or yellowish color.

The artist Ferdinand Hildebrandt painted another portrait of Zhukovsky commissioned by the Prussian King Frederick William IV, with whom the poet was good friends and maintained active correspondence. This painting was kept for many years in the royal Charlottenburg Castle. At first glance, both portraits are completely identical, the only addition is the Order Pour le Mérite (“For Merit”), which Zhukovsky was awarded by Frederick William in 1842. Currently, the second version of the portrait is kept in the Berlin National Gallery.