table lamps Important Russian Art Sale

table lampsHighlighting the sale will be Ilya Efimovich Repin’s (1844-1930) oil on canvas Portrait of the Artist’s

Wife, Vera Repin, dated 1878, which is widely considered one of the finest portraits of the artist’s

career. Repin first met Vera Shevtsova (1855-1918) when she was only nine years old, and she inspired some

of Repin’s most admired watercolour and pencil portraits. This particular portrait remained in Vera’s

collection, hanging in her flat on Karpovka until she died, at which point it was sold by her daughter.

Vera fell in love with Repin while she was still a student at the Mariinsky Institute. She was only 16 years

old when they were married in 1872, and Repin was ten years her senior. Though no match for him

intellectually, she was a sympathetic and appealing character, simple and childlike in her needs. Their

relationship became stormy, and nine years after the present work was painted the couple separated; they

reunited in 1894 but the marriage finally fell apart in 1900. The present masterpiece dates from a less

troubled period of their lives and remains the only known, published portrait of Vera Repin to exist outside

museum collections. Since it is, above all, his portraiture that has earned Repin international fame as one

of the greatest Western European practitioners of this genre, the reemergence of an intimate family portrait

from this period is a major event for all collectors and scholars of his work. The painting is estimated at

£1,000,000-1,500,000.

Further highlights in the sale include a group of outstanding paintings from renowned Russian artist Vasily

Vasilievich Vereschagin (1842-1904). These museum quality artworks are fresh to the market and have not been

seen publicly since the 1900s. Shipka Pass is the most impressive canvas ever to be offered at auction of

Vereschagin’s Balkan series, which consists of 25 paintings and 50 studies inspired by his first hand

impressions of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78. Not only does the present work mark a pivotal event of

Russian history, but in its restraint and minimalism, is also one of Vereshchagin’s most modern

compositions. In anticipation of hostilities, moved by patriotism, and as Vereschagin simply put it, filled

with ‘a great desire to see with my own eyes a regular European war,’ the artist requested to join the

staff of the Russian army as a volunteer in October 1878. Vereschagin was anxious that his series of Balkan

paintings should not be broken up, but although the future Tsar Alexander III and Grand Duke Nicholas both

expressed an interest in acquiring them, some of the canvases were deemed too controversial and the Prussian

military attaché even advised the Tsar to buy and destroy the entire series. In the event, Pavel Tretyakov

purchased five of the most important works; Ivan Tereschenko, a Kiev sugar baron, acquired five of the other

large canvases together with a number of studies and the remainder of the series was dispersed across the

world following an auction in New York in 1891. This oil on canvas is estimated at £300,000-500,000.

On Campaign, also from Vereschagin’s Balkan series comes from an Important European Collection. The

painting bears a hand-written authentication in Cyrillic by Vereschagin’s widow dated October 15, 1904,

suggesting that it remained in the artist’s collection until his death in 1904, at which time his widow was

forced to sell the work to pay off debts. On Campaign is an extraordinarily complex composition and perhaps

the most artistically ambitious of the entire Balkan series. The painting is estimated at £400,000-600,000.

The Taj Mahal, Evening, is one of the most important works to have resulted from Vereschagin's trip to India

from 1874 to 1876. The artist often approached the same monument or landscape at different times of day and

from varying perspectives, trying to catch the particularities of the changing light, and he is known to

have painted several versions of the Taj Mahal. A smaller view from the river in bright daylight is a

highlight of the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Two additional views of the Taj from the

garden, in the morning and the evening, were included in the sale at the American Art Galleries in New York

in 1891, when the present work was also first sold. The intensity of color in Vereschagin's Indian paintings

surpassed that of his earlier works, including the Turkestan series, and astonished critics at home and

abroad. The painting is estimated at £250,000-450,000.

A further work is Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky’s (1817-1900) oil on canvas Shepherds with Their Flock at

Sunset in the Crimea, dated 1859. The painting depicts grazing sheep, a theme which appears variously

throughout the artist's oeuvre. Aivazovsky often depicted sheep grazing peacefully on the Crimean steppe or

in Ukraine; before shearing; bathing in the Black Sea; during a rainstorm, or packed into a solid mass under

the heat of the evening sun, as in the present painting. Over the course of the 1870s and 1880s the artist

returned again and again to a theme which clearly captivated him. More than ten pictures with a similar

subject are known to exist and some of these paintings can now be found in Museums in Omsk, Irkutsk, Odessa,

Ashgabat, Ulan-Ude, and Chelyabinsk. One of these paintings — Sheep at Pasture (1850s) — is held at the

Tretyakov Gallery. This museum-quality artwork is estimated at £800,000 -1,200,000.

Another highlight from the forthcoming Important Russian Art Sale is Zinaida Evgenievna Serebriakova’s

(1884-1967) oil on canvas Reclining Nude. Acquired from the family of the artist by the present owner, this

piece is one of the finest large-scale oils by Serebriakova ever to come to auction, and shows the artist at

the height of her powers. The artwork recalls the nudes of Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet; Serebriakova had

arrived in Paris in the mid-1920s and was undoubtedly influenced by these masters in her adoptive homeland.

Serebriakova’s appreciation of the plasticity of the female form was extraordinary, yet from the mid-1930s,

she painted increasingly fewer nudes. Several of the Russian girls in Paris who used to pose for her got

married around 1934, and without the means to pay for professional models, Serebriakova simply lacked the

opportunity to return to one of her favourite subjects. Reclining Nude is property from a private European

collection and is estimated at £600,000-800,000.

Among the two contemporary artworks in the upcoming Russian Art auction will be Erik Bulatov’s (b.1933) oil

on canvas Winter. The painting was completed in 1988, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, a period

widely considered to be the artist’s best. The painting comes from a private collection and is estimated at

£60,000-80,000.

Also featured is Alexander Evgenievich Yakolev’s (1887-1938) oil on canvas Opera in Peking, which is dated

1918. This important painting is estimated at £800 1,200,000. One of the most important works to be painted

during the artist’s trip to the Far East in 1918, it underscores the artist’s belief that an appreciation

of the richness of ancient Chinese civilisation was crucial in grasping the essence of modern day China.

Exceptional in its daring use of perspective, Yakovlev’s powerful composition is believed to depict a scene

from a 16th century play by the poet Tang, The Peony Pavilion, which subsequently became the template for

the story of a perfect love.