Upon his accession to the throne, Emperor Paul I summoned Pyotr Tolstoy to Saint Petersburg, and Fyodor Petrovich returned to his parents.

For his wax bas-relief the Triumphal entrance of Alexander of Macedon into Babylon (1809, now in the Hermitage Museum), Tolstoy was elected an honorable member of the Academy of Arts.

From 1820 to 1833, he employed the Neoclassical technique of "raw sketch," or refined outline drawings without shading and hatchwork, to execute 63 illustrations for the Dushenka of Ippolit Bogdanovich.

As regards painting, Tolstoy specialized in interior scenes, full of symmetrical lines and Neoclassical statuary.

His Family Portrait (1830) "betrays a Romantic fascination with both psychological detail and tricks of lighting, perspective, and frames".

[1] In 1816, he became involved in freemasonry, eventually participating in the organization of the so-called "Lancasterian schools," designed to propagate literacy.

[2] Pushkin, who regarded Tolstoy as the finest of contemporary Russian artists, referred to him, not surprisingly, in his novel Eugene Onegin.

In an 1825 letter to his brother, Pushkin asked him to procure a vignette for the new edition of his poems: "What about having it done by Tolstoy's magic brush?