The painting depicts the Russian tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich Romanov (1629 - 1676), the second tsar of the Romanov dynasty, he ruled Russia in 1645-1676. This tsar is less known in the Western world mostly because his eventful and significant rule is overshadowed by the fame of his youngest son - Emperor Peter the Great.

As new artistic techniques were introduced from the west, parsuna in the late 17th century tended to be painted on canvas, rather than wooden boards. However, it still maintained the same basic iconographic style as earlier parsuna. The stylised forms used in parsuna reveal a lack of concern with preserving the actual features of a person, but rather their overall image: the tsar; the military leader; the influential boyar.

In this portrait we can trace the transition from two-dimensional icon painting on wood to three-dimensional portrait on canvas. Its charm lies in its naive union of the archaic devices of icon painting and the attempts of the anonymous artist to conform to the European portrait genre. The artist is already concentrating on capturing the texture and folds of the clothes and the facial features of a concrete individual.

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