The Portrait of Captain Commander Ilya A. Boratynsky was painted by Russian painter Vladimir Borovikovsky. Upon retirement from a military career, he took up painting. While Catherine the Great was touring the Crimean peninsula in 1787, he was asked to paint the walls of a house where the Empress was going to make a stop-over. She was fond of his work and invited Borovikovsky to move to St. Petersburg. There, he took lessons from painter Dimtry Levitsky and also worked in the studio of Austrian portrait painter Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder.

Early in the 19th century, Vladimir Borovikovsky introduced new features into Russian portraiture by trying to provoke viewers’ interest in human feelings and emotions. He was expressing the ideas of sentimentalism: unlike classicism, it asserted the right to show intimate and personal feelings of main characters. Among his most famous paintings are portraits of Countess Maria Lopukhina, Princess Elena Naryshkina, Princess A. G. Gagarina and Princess V. G. Gagarina − the sisters. The paintings are housed in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Vladimir Borovikovsky painted the portrait of Ilya Boratynsky in 1808. At that time the painter concentrated on depicting men of valour.

He portrayed Rear Admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy, a hero of Russian sea battles in the Russian-Swedish and Russian-Turkish wars. Boratynsky came from an old Polish noble family and was an uncle to poet Yevgeny Boratynsky.