RICHARD- KARL KARLOVICH ZOMMER (1866-1939)A Street Market with Figures, near a ruined mosquesigned

RICHARD- KARL KARLOVICH ZOMMER (1866-1939)

A Street Market with Figures, near a ruined mosque

signed in cyrillic (lower right)

oil on board

13 1/2 x 16 1/2 in (34.3 x 41.8cm)



The location depicted has traditionally been identified as Samarkand



Provenance: Fountain Charles Bolton, Esq,

by descent to his daughter Mollie Bolton,Worlingham. Surrey

Thence to the present vendor





The first known owner of this painting was Fountain Charles Bolton. He was manager for W.J. Bush & Co at their Moscow factory

producing oils and essences for the British market At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Fountain sent his wife and four children out of Russia escaping by sledge across the ice to Sweden and then to England. Fountain Bolton remained in Moscow hoping to save the business but soon it became apparent that he had to flee.It was now impossible to take the same route as his wife and children. He and a friend managed to get a place on one of the last trains leaving Moscow and travelled east via Nizhny Novgorod into Siberia.Once in Siberia they had to change trains and make do with places in a goods truck with no windows.The circumstances in which Fountain Bolton is said to have acquired the painting by Zommer shortly thereafter,are outlined in a manuscript text written by his daughter Mollie Bolton in a biographical essay about her early life, titled 'The Early Years'.



'Progress was very slow; sometimes they didn't move all day, often being stuck out in no-man's land in between stations.When stopping in village stations sometimes peasants came wanting to barter for any food travellers might have to spare. Father exchanged a loaf of bread for an oil painting of Samarkand (still in my possession) which he brought back home packed flat in the bottom of his suitcase'



Fountain travelled on through Siberia and Mongolia to Vladivostock and thence Japan. From there he joined a Danish Red Cross ship (where he had to sign on as medical attendant in order to board) bound for Vancouver. He eventually returned via America to the UK. The painting by Zommer became a prized possession for Bolton and a memento of his extraordinary escape from the Bolsheviks.



Richard Zommer, the artist, was a Russian of German origin, now remembered as something of an explorer artist. He studied at the Academy of Arts, St. Petersburg from 1884. Between 1890 and 1900 he travelled widely in central Asia. In the early 1900's he moved to Georgia and worked in the Caucasus Mountains, providing an invaluable record of life in that remote territory at the time. Later he travelled extensively in Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia between 1912 and 1917. During some of that time he taught and exhibited paintings at Tbilisi. Another Zommer painting with a colourful history, akin to the Brightwells example, which was acquired by a British army officer stationed in Tbilisi in 1915/6 and brought back rolled in an army map box to England shortly thereafter, was sold at Woolley & Wallis Auctioneers,Salisbury, lot 472 (titled 'Figures by a Mosque'), March 15th 2017.



Zommer's paintings of street scenes are often set in the mostly Muslim territories of old Russia.There the artist found rich material in the colourful bazaars, mosques and street processions in towns along the Silk Route. His better known pictures of Samarkand include a view of the Shir-dor Mosque, Samarkand (sold Sotheby's, London lot 39 May 31 2006) and A street Market near the ruins of the Bibi-Khanyan Mosque, Samarkand (sold Christies, London lot 349 November 26 2008).



In 1939 the Stalin regime forced Zommer to leave Georgia and no record of him has been found after that time. He is believed to have been interned and later died in a Siberian prison camp as part of Stalin's purge of non ethnic Russians.