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Lot 4
Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) The Wonderful Farm Machine Mixed media, 56 x 76.5cm (22 x 30") Signed Exhibited: "Gerard Dillon, New Collages", The Dawson Gallery, 1-17th May 1969, Cat No. 5; where purchased by the current owner An admirer of Marc Chagall, the artist's work from 1967 depicts complex multi-layered images often from the artist's subconscious, which are open to interpretation. Anxiety of his mortality following the death of his three brothers may have caused the artist's interest into Jungian psychology which led him to a deep psychological preoccupation to search for answers. The artist commented about these images "I have been able to use my subconscious and yet control it. It's poetic, and yet more colourful…"(Belfast Newsletter, 21/4/67) "The Wonderful Farm Machine" exhibited at the artist's solo show at the Dawson Gallery in 1969 is similar to another work sold in these salerooms "Clowns on a Bog" (lot 123, 2/6/10, see image) where the appearance of two masked Pierrot appear in a mountainous landscape with a farm machine. At first glance, the figures appear as farm labourers chasing birds from a wheat field, but the fantastical farm machine causes us to revisit the scene. The image may depict two worlds, the artist in an imagined or dream world, and living in his present one. The striped bird, Pierrot and machine may belong to the "poetic colourful world". The seated Pierrot with mannequin-like features resembles the artist's work from the 1950's, when the local people in the West of Ireland were captured resting against haystacks. To the left the jumping Pierrot draws the viewer to the shapes in the sky. The shapes may be clouds that represent his three brothers, Joe, John and Patrick. The Pierrot appears excited by the clouds, but may also be agitated by their proximity. Could the unadorned Pierrot, bird and clouds reflect the artist's conscious fear of his mortality? Perhaps in endeavouring to deal with his anxieties, the artist wished to depict a supernatural place, a landscape drawn from his memories of summers in Connemara, where a wonderful farm machine appears to be harvesting in a vivid yellow landscape. Influenced by the avant-garde artist Pablo Picasso, the artist loved to experiment with techniques and different approaches to image making. The landscape appears momentarily to be naturalistic, but by combing the paint while still wet, the lines accentuate rhythms, and the various cuts outs add texture and intensity to an otherwise flat image. Karen Reihill, who is currently researching the life and work of Gerard Dillon
Lot 24
Patrick Leonard HRHA (1918-2005) Unloading the Catch, Loughshinny Harbour Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 89cm (30.5 x 35") Signed Born the son of a Master Mariner, growing up and living in sight of the sea at Rush it was inevitable that Marine subjects would form an important part of Leonard's œuvre. The shoreline of Fingal including Skerries, Rush, Donabate and Loughshinny has always been an important fishing area particularly for crustaceans and the Seine fishermen have for centuries supplied the local and Dublin markets with these. In this work the Seine boats and their crews are being visited by the Fish Buying Agent, seen in a suit in the foreground with the skipper as an onlooker, and the various kinds of fish on offer will form part of the haul for the major fishmarkets. Traditional Seine Boats are seventeen feet long and clinker built with Elm bottoms and larch topsides. They were propelled by oars or sails and were usually named after the owner's mother or wife. These boats have been used in estuaries for hundreds of years working salmon seines. A salmon seine is a net that is two hundred yards long and over half a ton in weight. A seine boat carries the net and a four-man crew and is rowed by two fourteen-foot oars,the sail is the option for leaving and returning to port. The boats must be able to carry a ton of shellfish and still float in less than eighteen inches of water. In the past the Seine boats were also used in the winter months for catching herring and sprats. The conditions would be hazardous when working over the bar entrance to Loughshinny and Rush. Seine boats tend to be very safe and thus popular. They also figure in the trackless wastes of the storylines of East and West Cork as captured so amusingly and tellingly by the "Irish RM "stories and the law suits which figured in the Courthouse of Skebawn presided over by Major Yates RM, where the mysteries of dividing up the catch between the Crew & the Boats share would as Major Yates observed defy the arithmetic of Colenso. This vivid and sparkling work uses many of the visual syntactical approaches essayed by Seán Keating and Charles Lamb in their Western imagery, but made more immediate by the comparative modernity of the fishing craft and the attire of the figures in the foreground. The agelessness of the activity of fishing and selling the produce gives this work its timeless appeal and is a seamless restatement of and by artists who either live on Islands or whose local economy is virtually entirely dependent on the sea for a living. The sandy soil of the area, which also supports a large horticulture industry gives a particular quality of light, and which Patrick Leonard used to such vivid effect in so many of his finest works amongst which this work must rank very highly. By the repeated use of some colour notes like chrome yellow and reds creating internal dynamics of triangulation the artist stresses the visual appeal of the work by concentrating the eye of the viewer in several narrow bands of compositional interest and giving the work its "bounce" as a vivid and energetic pictorial statement of the life led in harvesting the Sea. Ciarán MacGonigal, May 2012
Lot 54
John Hogan (1800-1858) Bust of Francis Sylvester Mahony ("Fr. Prout") Marble, 50cm high (19.75") Made in Rome 1846 and signed Hogan Provenance, by descent in the family of the subject Literature "John Hogan, Irish Neoclassical Sculptor in Rome" (Irish Academic Press, 1982) where it is listed as No. 58 in the Catalogue Raisonné. Mahony wrote a description of Hogan's studio in Rome in the spring of 1847 which mentions his own portrait bust. "The locale which forms this sculptor's workshop (once tenanted by Canova) presents just now what may be termed a sort of Hibernian Valhalla…the bust of Father Mathew looks forth redolent of Christian philanthropy: on the same shelf is seen the mirthful brow of Father Prout…the late venerable Mr Beamish of Cork as well as his meritorious partner William Crawford, both models to any mercantile community, have their representations here, with several Murphies from that city." The bust was made before May 1847 so it is unlikely to have been this bust for which Mahony sat for Hogan in November 1847 as Turpin writes. The date is therefore likely to be 1846 rather than 1848. Turpin notes the low relief carvings on either side of the base. On one side an open chest with rolls of parchment and an antique lamp - an illusion to the 'discovery' of Fr Prout's literary remains in a chest - and on the other a book, a wine bottle, a chalice and a classical flask - apt symbols of Mahony's life. Francis Sylvester Mahony (Fr Proust) (1804-1866) "A very singular person, of whom the world tells a thousand and one tales, you know, but of whom I shall speak as I find him, because the utmost kindness and warmheartedness have characterised his whole bearing towards us….a most accomplished scholar and vibrating all over with learned associations and vivid combinations of fancy and experience - having seen all the ends of the earth and the men thereof, and possessing the art of talk and quotation to an amusing degree." Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 10th October 1848 Francis Mahony was born in Cork on 31st December 1804, the son of Martin Mahony a woollen merchant. He went to Clongowes in 1815, to the Jesuit college of St. Acheul at Amiens in 1819 and then to Paris as a Jesuit novice. From 1823-1825 he studied in Rome. He was "brilliant but intractable and ill-disciplined". Eventually he was told that he was not suitable for ordination as a Jesuit. Returning to Ireland still intent on ordination he was made Prefect of Studies at Clongowes and then Master of Rhetoric. Then disaster struck. He took a party of boys on an outing to have dinner in Maynooth. The boys got drunk and returned to Clongowes on turf-cutters' carts after midnight. Mahony resigned his post. He went abroad, continued his studies and was eventually ordained, but not as a Jesuit, in 1832. He served bravely in Cork during the Cholera epidemic of 1832 but again fell out with his superiors. After two years he went to London, gave up life as a priest and began the career in journalism for which he is remembered. His relations with the Church have continued to be uncertain. A friend wrote after his death that "he might have had a cardinal's hat but for that which is imputed to him as his one great fault - conviviality" Mahony loved the sociable, literary world of London. He wrote for Fraser's Magazine under the pseudonym of "Father Prout", allegedly the parish priest of Watergrasshill, near Cork. The editor William Maginn, Thomas Crofton Croker, the antiquarian and collector of Irish fairy stories and Daniel Maclise, the artist, were other Cork-born contributors. Mahony's writing shows him to have been a classical scholar, linguist and wit. He described himself as "an Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt." As a joke he alleged that Thomas Moore, then at the height of his success, was just a plagiarist, merely translating from French, Greek or Latin poems or other "originals" which Francis supplied. The Bells of Shandon - for long included in the Oxford Book of English Verse - was written as the supposed original of Moore's Evening Bells - a St Petersburg Air. Many of these articles were collected as The Reliques of Father Prout. From 1837 he wrote for Charles Dickens's Bentley's Miscellany from Italy. His contributions were collected and published in 1847 as Facts and Figures from Italy by Don Jeremy Savonarola - another pseudonym - with a brief foreword by Dickens. Mahony settled finally in Paris where for eight years he was the correspondent of The Globe and where he died in 1866. He is buried at Shandon in Cork. One of his obituarists wrote "Indeed Francis Mahony… was no common man, either in genius or expression. Many elements met in him, as in a mayonnaise, to make a piquant mixture. He was a Jesuit and a humourist; a priest and a Bohemian; a scholar and a journalist; a wag and a song-writer; a Cork man familiar to everyone in Rome, a Roman Catholic ecclesiastic well known in the convivial clubs of London."
Lot 69
Attributed to James Sinton Sleator RHA (1889-1950) Self-Portrait in the Artist's Studio Oil on board, 46 x 30.5cm (18 x 12") This self-portrait was inherited by the present owners some forty years ago and it was always thought to be by the noted Irish painter James Sinton Sleator. After comparing this work with a number of other self-portraits by Sleator, two of which are in the National Gallery of Ireland, we can see no reason to doubt this attribution. Stylistically, it is very close to his work and on examination of his palette we can see the turquoise colour used on the right hand side is one that often appears in his other works, especially his still-life work. Most of his other known self-portraits are also unsigned. Sleator was born in Derrycarne, near Portadown, Co. Armagh and as both his parents were school-teachers they later settled in Belfast. In about 1903 Sleator entered the Belfast College of Art before enrolling in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin as a mature student in 1909. Sleator had a distinguished career at the Metropolitan School of Art where his contemporaries included Leo Whelan, Albert Power, Margaret Clarke and Sean Keating. It was here that he came under the influence of Sir William Orpen, an influence that remained with him for the rest of his life. On leaving art college he became Orpen's studio assistant in London, a position he held on and off for the next fifteen years until Orpen's death in 1931. He actually finished some of Orpen's unfinished commissions after his death. It was Orpen who introduced the young Irish artist to Sir Winston Churchill to whom he ended up giving painting lessons. As well as working with Orpen, Sleator established his own successful practice as a portrait painter. The present work is thought to date to the mid to late 1920's. The artist is shown in a confident pose, while the female model cowers behind, initially looking rather innocent but the bright red shoes and lipstick suggest that this may not have been the case. At some levels this work is an 'Homage' to his teacher, who was also very fond of self-portraits. By 1941, at the onset of war, Sleator had moved back to Dublin permanently where he became a prominent member of the art world. This was the golden age of Irish portraiture and so 'Orpen's boys', Sleator, Leo Whelan and Sean O'Sullivan became the portraitists of the rich, famous and influential of Irish social and business circles. Sleator was well regarded by the critics and artists alike and on the death of Dermod O'Brien PRHA in 1945 he was appointed President of the RHA, a position he held until his own sudden death in Academy House in January 1950.
Lot 143
Markey Robinson (1918-1999) Still Life with Guitar & Lemon Oil on board, 44 x 61.5cm (17.3 x 24.25"£) Signed Provenance: Tom Caldwell Memorial Exhibition, Belfast, Sept. 2008, cat. no. xx (label verso) Literature: Dr Michael Mulreany, Markey Robinson: Maverick Spirit, Belfast 2003, illustrated page 174
Lot 10
ROCKLINE, VERA (1896-1934) Vue de Tiflis , signed "V. Rockline", also signed "Schlesinger" in Cyrillic. Oil on canvas, 97.5 by 75.5 cm. Provenance: Anonymous sale; Important Russian Pictures, Christie’s London, 28 November 2007, Lot 425.Private collection, UK.Exhibited: Rétrospective Vera Rockline, Galerie Drouart, Paris, 1984 (label and stamp on the stretcher).Femmes et Muses des Impressionnistes aux Modernes, Tokyo, Osaka and elsewhere, 1996-1997, No. 47.Elles de Montparnasse, Musée de Montparnasse, Paris, 12 April-4 August 2002.Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Femmes et Muses des Impressionnistes aux Modernes, 1996, p. 77, No. 47, illustrated, titled Paysage de Tiflis.Vue de Tiflis is one of the very few known works of Vera Rockline’s Russian period. The artist developed a passion for painting Cubist townscapes in the late 1910s under the influence of Alexandra Exter, her tutor in Kiev, whose studio the young artist, still bearing her maiden name Schlesinger, joined in 1918 after her parents moved there from Moscow. Before this, the young woman had been studying in Moscow at Ilya Mashkov’s studio of drawing and painting where, according to her contemporaries, she painted Neo-impressionist work of which little is now known.In the years 1918-1919, still under the name of Schlesinger, the artist took part in the Moscow Fellowship of Artists’ 24th exhibition; the 2nd exhibition of pictures by the Artists’ Union, the exhibition of Jewish artists’ painting and sculpture; and the 5th National Exhibition of painting From Impressionism to Non-objectivity. In the same year, however, the artist married and left with her new husband for Georgia. In 1919-1920 Rockline lived in Tiflis, where she created a small series of paintings and drawings of the city.In these works, the images of Tiflis are created using precise, sculpturally shaped volumes, and it seems as if all it would take is just one detail, one component, to be removed for gaps to open up and the whole thing to collapse. However, Rockline’s Cubism never crosses the line into complete freedom of form. Her paintings of this time are restrainedly Cubist and somewhat unreal: although possibly less free in their structure than the compositions of Exter, they are finer and more delicate in palette and closer in manner to Cézanne. In the landscapes that she painted in Georgia, the contraposition of masses is not quite so forceful as in her work as a student following in Exter’s footsteps. The connection between the masses is through Cézanne-like transitions that even out the light and dismember volumes into a mosaic of planes turned towards the viewer. In this period Rockline was striving to depict the space between objects rather than accentuating their convexity in the empty space of traditional perspective. She was interested primarily in the materialisation of that new urban architectural space which she felt in the Georgian capital. For this reason Rockline invariably brings mountains or the Kura River into her urban compositions of Tiflis, acting as a spatial caesura and providing a rhythmic prop for the viewer.In the present lot, painted in wonderfully harmonious dark blue-greens, browns and blacks, the caesura is the broad watery expanse of the Kura. But in her portrayal of water Rockline’s vision remains Cubist - she breaks down the river’s mass into elements and planes and portrays the restless motion of the water by colliding small flat areas of colour and geometrically compact shapes, rearranged and squeezed together by the strict sculptural and decorative rhythms of the spans of Mikhailovsky Bridge stretching out to Madatovsky Island.Like the majority of landscapes from this cycle, Vue de Tiflis is deserted, but in no way dead. Although there are no human figures, the boats in the foreground and the chimneys in the distance are evidence of life going on around. The main emphasis is on the sculptural expressiveness of the shapes. Buildings are vigorously cut up into shining facets, allowing them to be seen from various viewpoints at the same time. Rockline makes maximum use of opportunities to flatten out space, as ever restricting the depth in perspective of her Cubist structures by a succession of walls or the crested ridge of a mountain. All this makes Vue de Tiflis one of the most expressive and significant works of Rockline’s early period.
Lot 16
* PETROV-VODKIN, KUZMA (1878-1939) Still Life. Apples and Eggs , signed with a monogram, inscribed in Cyrillic "S-kand" and dated "1921-VII". Oil on canvas, 35.5 by 47 cm. Provenance: Collection of G. Blokh, Leningrad.Collection of N. Efron, Leningrad.Collection of A. Chudnovsky, Leningrad.Private collection, Europe.Authenticity certificate from the experts N. Aleksandrova and T. Zelyukina.Exhibited: Avantgarde 1900-1930: Tšudnovskin kokoelma Pietarista, Ateneum, Helsinki, 14 October 1993-9 January 1994, No. 53 (label on the reverse).Avantgarde 1900-1930: Tšudnovskin kokoelma Pietarista, Turku Art Museum, Turku, 5 February 1994-6 March 1994, No. 53 (label on the reverse).K.S. Petrov-Vodkin. Izbrannoe, The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, 1996 (label on the reverse).Literature: V. Kostin, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1986, No. 64, illustrated; p. 157, listed.Exhibition catalogue, Avantgarde 1900-1930: Tšudnovskin kokoelma Pietarista, Helsinki, 1993, p. 102, No. 53, illustrated.Still Life. Apples and Eggs is one of the most typical and recognisable of Petrov-Vodkin’s works of the early 1920s. It was painted in Samarkand during the summer of 1921 when he was travelling around Central Asia with an expedition organised by the Academy of the History of Material Culture and it very clearly reflects his experimental path from the abstract space of his early years to the metaphysical world of “planetary reality”, full of colour and light.On the table, which is covered with a vivid, rich sky-blue cloth or sheet of paper, there are apples - some red and green, one yellow - and two eggs. At first glance we are struck by the absolute verisimilitude of the depiction: the sharply delineated flattened spheres of the apples, with their light, mauve shadows, and the accurately gauged ellipse of the eggs, warmed by the sun. The modesty of this still life, fairly typical of everyday life in those hard years, did not prevent the artist from creating a serene and exceptionally harmonious piece.In this still life we can sense that special sensitivity and pursuit of the metaphysical essence of objects and phenomena that became the defining element of Petrov-Vodkin’s works of the late 1910s and early 1920s and which resonated with the principles of his Italian contemporaries, Carrà and de Chirico. In its well thought-out haphazardness and in the seemingly random scattering of the fruit across the surface we see the artist’s carefully planned game; he is trying to trace, to get a feel for the inherent interconnection between objects by their very arrangement - the hidden life of inanimate matter. On the one hand, this “magic of corporeality” allows the artist to convey faithfully the concrete attributions of an object (of a greenish, ripe apple, of an egg) but on the other, to create a universalised image of that object, its Platonic eidos: the apple is a generous gift of the earth, the egg a symbol of the eternal beginning of life.Arranging his colour harmonies around the subtle juxtaposition of primary and complementary colours, Petrov-Vodkin achieves a striking vibrancy and richness. The artist is looking at the foodstuffs placed about the table from on high so that their configuration can be accurately rendered and we see them “as if in the palm of our hand”. In this way the artist tries to overcome the one-sidedness of the monocular point of view, considering it neither adequate nor a reflection of genuine knowledge of the object which can and must be viewed from as many angles as possible in order to form a true idea of it. Thus Petrov-Vodkin’s still lifes always have a peculiarly intense character generated by the strong lines of “spherical perspective” which spread throughout the whole space of the canvas. For Petrov-Vodkin, the problem posed by the object is inseparable from the concept of spherical perspective. Although he noted that this acquires an “even greater kinetic sense” in relation to large-scale objects - “landscapes and urban spaces”, which are inconceivable for him without strong “planetary” motion - the apples, matches and violins of his still lifes are connected with planetary motion in exactly the same way. It is no coincidence that a tilted perspective and tilted pictorial axis appear in all of them.The technique based on his “spherical system of perception”, allows Petrov-Vodkin to convey the whole in part, to retain in any still life a sense of the link between the object portrayed and the infinite expanse of the universe. As the artist himself confirmed, it is no coincidence that his study of the object, and by extension his principal work on still lifes, took place during the years of revolution. It seemed to him that without doing this he could not progress further; he could not solve the new artistic challenges he was presented with. Petrov-Vodkin succintly defined this genre, which was so important to him at this period: “The still life is one of the intense conversations the artist has with nature. In it, subject matter and psychology do not hinder the definition of an object in its space. What kind of object is it, where is it, and where am I, the viewer? This is the fundamental question the still life asks of us. And in this there is the great joy of knowing, which is what the viewer takes from the still life.”Petrov-Vodkin had occasionally painted still lifes of flowers and apples earlier in his career, but it was only from about 1918 to 1920 that they became central to his work. During this period he also regularly inserted into his landscapes and portraits the motif of an appletree branch loaded with fruit or of a single fruit or vegetable (Midday, 1917; Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter with Still Life, 1930s). However, thanks to their wonderfully sculptural forms and their graceful draughtsmanship and colour design, each of this artist’s still lifes with apples (Pink Still Life, Apple Tree Branch, 1918; Apple and Cherry, 1917; Apples, 1917; Still Life with Blue Cube, 1918 etc.) proves to be as beautiful and expressive as it is self-contained.Having resolved his major creative challenges of this period in both painting and drawing, Petrov-Vodkin did return from time to time to this genre, but the still life never again reached such heights in his oeuvre. The conciseness and creative concentration of his still lifes from the late 1910s to early 1920s (which invoke fundamental symbols, religious and cultural principles of existence and compassion for spiritual and physical hunger) make them, perhaps, the benchmark standards of Russian art of the post-Revolutionary period, alongside Pavel Filonov’s revolutionary Formula paintings.
Lot 25
*§ LARIONOV, MIKHAIL (1881-1964) Flowers on a Veranda , signed with initials, further inscribed with the artist`s name and dated 1902 on the reverse. Oil on canvas, laid on board, 54.5 by 97.5 cm. Provenance: Alexandra Tomilina, the artist’s widow, Paris.Private collection, Europe.Exhibited: Larionov-Gontcharova, Galerie Beyeler, Basel, July-September 1961 (label on the reverse).Michel Larionov, Acquavella Galleries, New York, 22 April-24 May 1969, No. 6 (label on the reverse). Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Michel Larionov, Acquavella Galleries, New York, 1969, No. 6, illustrated.Flowers on a Veranda is an outstanding example of Mikhail Larionov’s early work. This idiosyncratic piece has an impeccable provenance which can be traced back to the estate of the artist’ s widow, and is a rare example (even for museum collections) of his works in oil from the early 1900s. Unlike his works in pastel and gouache, very few oils of this period have been preserved, so each is particularly precious.It is most likely that the artist painted Flowers on a Veranda after his year-long exclusion from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture for sending pieces featuring “obscene content” to an exhibition of student work. Captivated by the experiments of the Impressionists which he had seen in the Moscow collection of Sergei Shchukin, Larionov was then beginning to consider himself a truly independent artist, liberated from academic didacticism. Every summer he would leave Moscow for his maternal grandmother’s home in Tiraspol, Bessarabia, where he had spent his childhood and where he now wholly devoted himself to painting from nature. The significance of these works in the artist’s creative development cannot be overestimated.He converted a wing of his grandmother’s house, with its enormous garden planted with apricot trees, into a studio, and there produced a series of canvasses, paeans to the everyday life unfolding outside his window. His best works of the first half of the 1900s are full of sunshine and greenery and depict pots of flowers, lilac bushes, geese and turkeys strolling about the yard. Stylistically these pieces, including Flowers on a Veranda, are reminiscent of his early works in which we recognise the influence of Borisov-Musatov and the plein air approach to rendering phenomena. Yet these are not studies, in the 19th century sense of the word, but finished pictures painted from nature, which are absolutely consonant with the art of the new century. In Larionov’s work of the 1900s, the question of distinguishing between a preparatory study and a finished picture does not even arise. Rather orangeries, acacias, roses wet from the rain and even pigs grow from the primary elements of a study into an autonomous painting, whilst retaining both the typically small dimensions and the dynamic paint application of a study. Flowers on a Veranda is similar in composition to the well-known 1904 work now in the Russian Museum, Still Life with Beer, in which the characteristic traits of Larionov’s celebrated works of the 1900s first appear. Despite their simplicity, the objects arranged on the veranda create a feeling of dynamic equilibrium. The pot holding the plant with luxuriant foliage emphasises the centripetal movement of the composition towards the corner of the veranda, literally dividing the picture into two practically equal halves. At the same time, the general structure of the picture is defiantly fragmentary: the flowerpots in the bottom row barely protrude from the edge of the canvas and the right-hand corner of the composition is dramatically cropped along both edges. The framing is extremely tight. It is as if the scene has entered the artist’s field of vision quite by chance. Larionov was not sitting down at a table to paint his still life, as Cézanne had done, but standing, and because of his significant height objects seem to retreat downwards, beyond the confines of the picture area. By doing this he creates the impression of dynamism, so important in avant-garde art of the early 20th century, of the motion of the human eye as if it were skimming across the line of plants by the window. The artist has placed an analogous counterpoint in the paint layer of the picture: He counters the firm, stationary mass of the ochre clay pots, the blue table and solid, wood-clad terrace wall, dappled with a pattern of shadow, with the Van Gogh-style light that streams through the window, seemingly “quilted” in thickly-impastoed, multi-directional brush-strokes.The composition is based on two main colours, red and yellow, with the addition of blue and green to reinforce the contrast. Almost everywhere, the blue serves to demarcate the yellow from the red zones. Only where light dominates completely, flooding into the room through the window panes, does a fiery red abut directly on to a bright yellow injecting an extraordinary colouristic force into the composition. The pot plants seem to be indoors but at the same time bathed in bright, exterior daylight. According to Gleb Pospelov, a renowned expert on the artist, “the light in Larionov’s works seemed to shine through a flattened reality. It somehow issued from the phenomenon of life itself… a radiance animated from within which permeated all living things: this was the defining essence of his art. The whole of Larionov’s oeuvre was a benediction on that which was alive and living, the like of which was completely absent from the work of other Russian painters at this time.”Larionov’s paintings were truly unique in European Post-Impressionist art. His dedication to “the living world” was inseparable from his extremely perceptive experiments in “liberating the paint layer”. It is no coincidence that in his pictures of the 1900s the “element” of paint confronts the elements of nature. The energy in Larionov’s best canvasses of the period is created from this very desire for equilibrium in the confrontation of these forces and this is clearly seen in the present lot.In Flowers on a Veranda, with its tendency to generalise the impact of the palette, its fusion of individual brushstrokes into one splash of colour and its decorative resolution of the whole, we clearly see Larionov establishing himself as one of the founders of the Russian avant-garde and as a major artist of the 20th century, head and shoulders above his contemporaries.
Lot 30
MAKOVSKY, ALEXANDER (1869-1924) View of Plios , signed, inscribed in Cyrillic "Plios" and dated 1918. Oil on canvas, 67 by 85 cm. Provenance: Private collection, UK.Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert V. Petrov.Exhibited: Possibly exhibited at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Petrograd, 1918, No. 97.View of Plios is one of Alexander Makovsky’s best-known works. Son of the celebrated Peredvizhnik Vladimir Makovsky, Alexander arrived at the banks of the Volga, earlier immortalised by Levitan, as an already mature artist. In the hard years after the Revolution, this small settlement and its picturesque surroundings which still retained features of the old merchant life became a bountiful source of inspiration, tinged with nostalgia. Here, during his summer migration from his job as head of the art department of the Russian Red Cross Society, Makovsky created a whole series of notable canvasses, halfgenre, half-landscape and saturated with light and colour, which have become one of the most brilliant episodes in his oeuvre.After a long break, the artist in his Volga paintings of the 1920s returns to painting large-scale, highly-populated compositions, and for these he produces a large number of carefully rendered studies portraying distant river vistas and individual protagonists - peasants, boatmen, merchants and those out strolling along the river bank. It is no coincidence that we sometimes encounter those same protagonists, depicted by Makovsky in his series of tempera works, Volga Types (1922), and in small oils such as Peasant with a Tobacco Pouch and Acquaintances (both 1921), The Mushroom Gatherer, and The Old Beekeeper (both 1922), in such major paintings as the present lot View of Plios, and many others: Market Day at Plios (1919-1923), Waiting for the Ferry (1920-1923), Street in Plios (1923), Easter Procession (1921-1923) and At the Ferry (1924). Most works in Makovsky’s Plios cycle have long since entered the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery and other leading museums of Russian art, thus the appearance on the market of a work of this quality can without doubt be considered a great rarity.
Lot 33
* SUDEIKIN, SERGEI (1882-1946) Porcelain Figures and Flowers , signed. Oil on canvas, 92.5 by 71.5 cm. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert I. Geraschenko.Literature: G. Romanov, Mir iskusstva. 1898-1927, St Petersburg, 2010, p. 967, illustrated.Porcelain and flowers: the decorative potential of this combination had at one time been appreciated for its full worth by the Flemish painters. With the passage of time, however, this kind of still life fell out of favour and was glimpsed only rarely in the pages of art history, until a new wave of enthusiasm for porcelain and floral motifs engulfed the culture of Art Nouveau. The vulnerable frailty of picked flowers and fine china literally became an obsession in passéiste culture as the 20th century moved from its first decade into its second. Their fragile beauty was forever being rhapsodised in Symbolist and Acmeist poetry and they were depicted in a flood of still life work by the recent Blue Rose and World of Art painters.The most vivid and coherent embodiment of the theme of porcelain and flowers can be found in the creative work of three outstanding Russian painters of the period: Sergei Sudeikin, Nikolai Sapunov and Alexander Golovin. The exquisite, almost ornate, images they painted, inspired by the desire - in Abram Efros`s well-turned phrase - “to depict beautiful things beautifully”, always bore the recognisable stamp of each artist’s individual creativity.This composition of Sergei Sudeikin’s Porcelain Figures and Flowers is one of the most original and refined images of this group. In painting his canvas it is as if the artist were weaving the objects depicted into a fanciful pattern, thereby emphasising the decorativeness and deep symbolic significance of the composition. The vase with two artificial roses and the little porcelain figures are portrayed against the background of a piece of wallpaper, or upholstery material, in the Chinoiserie style. The density and impasto of the brushwork in the background, however, differs from that used for the objects, which makes the surface of the painting start to vibrate, and the delicate lilac gauze, its tints soaking up the white of the glazed china, creates a special magnetic, contemplative atmosphere. If in other compositions by Sudeikin, such as Saxon Figurines (1911, The State Russian Museum), Flowers and Porcelain (1910, private collection), Flowers and Statuette (1900s, The State Tretyakov Gallery) or the Still Lifes (1909 and 1911, both in the State Russian Museum) the objects often conceive a game among themselves, and the china marquises and shepherdesses play out scenes that are almost theatrical, then in this composition lethargy reigns in a static and enchanted slumber. The porcelain figurines sleep in each others’ arms, the naked nymph who only a second before had been pulling on her stocking is motionless, as though pricked by a spindle, the water in the tumbling, sparkling stream painted on the backcloth has frozen, and the paper flowers in the vase exude a passionless, timeless beauty. Through this painting Sudeikin transmits the quintessential aestheticism of the World of Art - an illusory world populated by ephemeral images. Their life is only a magical dream created by the artist’s fantasy - enchanting precisely because of its impermanence, and ready to vanish like a sleeping vision. The artist casts a sort of haze over these still lifes, a gauze that insists the painting be perceived as a beautiful reverie.The way the painting is resolved in terms of structure rests on the play between plane and depth, pattern and object. On the one hand the artist affirms the substantive reality of a flower, using every means to define it, but at the same time he creates a certain feeling of deception to the flowers in their arrangement and colour, a sort of sense of mystification. This makes the still life seem like magic exposed, a conjuror’s trick with its artifice laid bare. Sudeikin creates a world of image in which artificiality, fabulous invention and the exposure of these qualities act in uninterrupted communication and become the intrinsic idea and content of the entire composition.
Lot 41
* FALK, ROBERT (1886-1958) Still Life with Rowan Berries and Fruit , numbered "89" and bearing a label inscribed in Cyrillic and signed by A. Shchekin-Krotova, the artist`s wife, on the stretcher. Oil on canvas, 54 by 64 cm. Painted in 1945.Provenance: Private collection, Europe.Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert I. Geraschenko.Literature: D. Sarabianov, Yu. Didenko, Zhivopis’ Roberta Fal’ka. Polnyi katalog proizvedenii, Moscow, Elizium, 2006, p. 697, No. 1032, illustrated in black and white.With its understated beauty and elegant simplicity, Still Life with Rowan Berries and Fruit is painted with the quiet authority of a master artist. This work dates from a time when both Falk’s artistic career and his personal life were in turbulence. After the decade of self-imposed exile in Paris and war-time evacuation to Central Asia, the artist was at a remove from the official artistic life of his homeland. The innovation and influence of European art, which had been so prevalent at the beginning of his career, had been smothered by Socialist Realism and the surge of totalitarianism. No longer held in the same regard by the authorities, the “Russian Cézanne” was at best viewed with suspicion, and having suffered the loss of his beloved son, Valery, threw himself into his work and teaching.Still lifes had always been a mainstay of Falk’s oeuvre, but these later works are characterised by their thick, heavily impastoed paint layer as the artist returned over and over again to the same canvasses, endlessly reworking them. In the absence of any major official commissions he was by now mainly painting for himself and many works of this period can be considered intellectual exercises as well as cathartic. Returning to ideas which had preoccupied him since his youth, the influence of both Cézannism and Cubism is still present. Drama is created by the contrast and interplay between the bright red berries and the dense, murky space which they inhabit and the independence of each object from the collective whole is emphasised by the ambiguity of the space and the slightly flattened perspective. However there is nothing cold and academic about this work. The quiet, calm melancholia, which had always been Falk’s artistic calling card, is present everywhere: it is discernible in his palette, in the fruit which is beginning to dry and shrivel and in the shadows, but not once does it detract from the overall beauty of the work, in fact it is in this disarming honesty of emotion that the beauty of Falk’s oeuvre lies.
Lot 46
DEINEKA, ALEKSANDR (1899-1969) Still Life with Azalea and Apples , signed and dated 1937. Oil on canvas, 64.5 by 74.5 cm. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert T. Levina.Deineka’s 1937 painting Still Life with Azalea and Apples is a fine example of his work in the still life genre from the period when his artistic talent was blossoming. It was painted soon after his return from an extended trip to the USA, France and Italy, and it retains that very keen, strong “impression of an assertive freshness of technique”, of which the renowned critic Abram Efros wrote in 1935.In the artist’s approach to his entirely traditional nature morte - flowers, fruit and drapery - there is none of the unity of picturesque subject matter inherent in classical painting, which portrays everything in a single textural key. With Deineka, it is as though he endows every object with its own personal texture and colour, emphasising the diversity of the matter of which the forms are composed - a diversity of organic matter and geometry. Natural shapes that are round - the flower-heads, the foliage, the apples - are moulded in strokes of thick, sculptural impasto. Treatment of the clay pot and bright yellow porcelain dish is more subtle, but solid enough. And lastly, the busy checked pattern of the fabric is painted deliberately sketchily and the paint layer is fairly light (similar checked fabric will appear in the dress of the model in Deineka’s later work Young Construction Worker, painted in 1966).Painting crafted in this way shows the impact of Cubist collage, transformed to introduce a variety of textures to the painted surface. A distinct pure form of the style became especially evident in the work of Deineka’s senior contemporary and close associate within the Society of Easel Painters, David Shterenberg. While Deineka does not venture so far into laying bare techniques as does Shterenberg, there is a palpable interplay of contrasting material structures in his Still Life with Azalea and Apples.
![Exploration and Surveys ([Lot of 2] Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains Vol. 1 & Vol. II),](http://lot-images.atgmedia.com/SR/36385/2862480/908-2012510171543_468x382.jpg)
Lot 908
Exploration and Surveys ([Lot of 2] Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains Vol. 1 & Vol. II), Irving, Philadelphia, 1836. 5.5 x 9”. (BW) This is the first edition, first state of this "classic account of the first American attempt at settlement of the Pacific Coast" (Howes). Irving`s history of John Jacob Astor`s attempt to bring American fur trade to the Pacific was based on revised transcripts of the journals of Robert Stuart , Wilson Price Hunt and Ramsay Crooks. Among these were " journals and letters narrating expeditions by sea, and journeys to and fro across the Rocky Mountains by routes before untraveled, together with documents illustrative of savage and colonial life on the borders of the Pacific." Included in the 2nd volume is the map Sketch of the routes of Hunt and Stuart. While there is not much detail, Wheat says, "for what it purports to be it is an excellent map." The title pages have a stamp of the "Philermenian Society" which was a Brown University Literary Society. First edition, with the copyright notice and "Henry W. Rees, Stereotyper" on the verso of the title-page of volume one. Volume 1 contains 285 pp. and volume 2 has 279 pp. Both volumes are bound in their original half leather with marbled paper boards. Gilt title on embossed spine. Ref: Howes I-81; Wheat (TMW) no.419. The map has some light foxing and minor extraneous creasing near the folds, as well as several archivally repaired fold separations and short tears. The text pages are lightly foxed and the covers are somewhat worn, but the books are still quite presentable. (B)
Lot 171
Bacon (Gertrude). The Record of An Aeronaut. Being the Life of John M. Bacon, by His Daughter, 1st ed., 1907, port. frontis., b & w illusts. from photos, t.e.g., orig. cloth gilt, rubbed, 8vo, together with Winchester (Clarence), Flying Men & Their Machines. A Literary and Photographic Record of Facts Concerning Flying with Special Reference to those Pilots who have so Bravely Sacrificed Their Lives and to those who Happily Still Practise the Newest of Arts, 1st ed., 1916, port. frontis., b & w illusts. from photos, some minor scattered spotting, orig. cloth, a little rubbed and darkened on spine, 8vo, plus Knight (Clayton), Pilots` Luck. Drawings by Clayton Knight, with Excerpts from Stories by Elliott White Springs, Captain A. Roy Brown, Floyd Gibbons and Norman S. Hall, pub. Philadephia, 1929, col. and b & w illusts., orig. cloth gilt with large pict. panel on upper cover, rubbed and minor wear to spine, slim folio, with others of aviation interest including John Hamilton publications, etc. (3 shelves)
Lot 77
Paul Henry RHA (1876-1958) DOOGORT FROM SLIEVEMORE, ACHILL, 1919-1920 oil on canvas board with label of Reeves & Sons, Ltd, London sketching tablet on reverse 7.50 by 10.50in. (19.05 by 26.67cm) Provenance: The collection of Mrs. Barrett, Bervie Guest House, Achill Island; Christie`s, `Fine Irish Paintings and Drawings`, 26 May 1989, lot 281; Private collection; Adam`s, 26 February 1990, lot 87, as The Sandy Shore; Private collection Literature: Kennedy, S.B., Paul Henry Paintings Drawings Illustrations, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2007, p.211, catalogue no. 538 (illustrated) When Paul Henry first arrived on Achill Island he lodged with John and Eliza Barrett, who ran the post office in the village of Keel. `To this day,` he wrote late in life, `I have a warm feeling of gratitude to John and Eliza Barrett,` who in due course gave him `infinite and ungrudging` hospitality (Henry, An Irish Portrait, London, 1951, p. 4). The Barrett`s granddaughter, who today with her husband runs The Bervie Guesthouse at Keel, later owned the picture. The strand in the foreground is the beach at Doogort and the road on the right hand side still winds its way through the tiny hamlet, which is little changed from Henry`s time. The distant mountains are on the mainland of Co. Mayo, just north of Mallaranny. The fluid handling of the paint, with moderate impasto, is characteristic of Henry`s later Achill period and thus suggests a date of execution of around 1919-20. Dr. S.B. Kennedy April 2012 (£4,860-£6,480 approx)
Lot 134
Grace Henry HRHA (1868-1953) STILL LIFE WITH LILAC IN A BLUE BOWL oil on canvas signed lower right; with provenance inscribed in pencil on reverse 14 by 16in. (35.56 by 40.64cm) Provenance: Collection of Judge Meredith; Private collection The Rt. Hon. Richard Edmund Meredith PC, QC (18 November 1855 - 1916), was the Master of the Rolls in Ireland, a Privy Councillor, Judge of the Supreme Court of Ireland and Judicial Commissioner of the Irish Land Commission. (£650-£810 approx)
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