The portrait of Alexey Petrovich Melgunov, Governor-General of Yaroslavl Governorate, was donated to the museum by Vladimir Goryachev, the artist who painted it. The obverse side of the painting shows a color image made in oil on canvas on a vertical rectangle stretcher. A half-length portrait of a lean, middle-aged man is depicted on a dark background.

The man in the portrait has a small head on a low neck covered with a collar. The shoulders are round and narrow. The white luxuriant wig on his head is slicked back over his forehead, with two curls on the sides, falling down to his ears. The left ear is pressed against the head, covered by hair on top. The oval face is yellowish, the forehead is high and open; the dark-blonde curved eyebrows are wing-shaped and high-positioned; the nose is long and straight. The gaze is straight. There is a vertical dimple between the base of the nose and the upper lip. In the corners of the lips there are dark folds. The skin of the face is smoothly shaved. There is a red blush on the rounded cheeks. The full and round chin has a dimple in the middle. His expression is serious.

Melgunov is dressed in a dark caftan with round gray buttons and a white shirt with a jabot. A wide blue decoration ribbon is thrown over his right shoulder. Four orders are attached on the left side of his chest. Two of them are large silver stars with round medallions in the center. There is an oblique cross on one of them, and a straight cross on the other. Two more orders are small red straight crosses with four expanding ends, openwork decorations in the corners and round medallions in the center.

Aleksey Melgunov was a figure of the Russian Enlightenment, an Actual Privy Councillor, and in the words of Catherine the Great, “a very, very useful man for the state”. Melgunov organized a printing house in the fortress of St. Elizabeth, and was the first to conduct archaeological excavations of Scythian mounds on the Dnieper. In 1762, he was part of a group of researchers who excavated the so-called Melgunov barrow near Elisavetgrad — a rich Scythian burial of the early 6th century BC. He was the author of the report on the reform of public education in Russia.