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Lot 160
A four piece Epns tea and coffee set by James Dixon & Sons of classical form with embossed acanthus leaf and floral decoration, comprising coffee pot, teapot, milk and sugar, teapot with engraved inscription "Presented to Mr & Mrs McKenzie by Friends On the Occasion Of Their Leaving Portree, Feb 1901", coffee pot 29 cm high
Lot 12
* VOLKOV, ALEKSANDR 1886-1957 Listening to the Bedana , signed. Oil on canvas, laid on board, 97.5 by 97.5 cm. Executed in the 1920s.Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist’s family by the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, probably in the 1960s.Acquired from the above by an American dealer.Private collection, USA.Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the artist’s family.Exhibited: Russian Exhibition. Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures Directly from the U.S.S.R., Saks Galleries, Colorado, November 1975.Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Russian Exhibition. Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures Directly from the U.S.S.R., Saks Galleries, Colorado, November 1975, illustrated.Aleksandr Volkov was one of the most brilliant representatives of the “Eastern avant-garde”. His Uzbek imagery entered art history for the bold addition it made to traditional Orientalism, approached with the geometrisation and division of space found in Cubism, Futurism and Suprematism.Listening to the Bedana, painted in the 1920s, belongs to a new stage in this artist’s career in which he experimented with figurative representation. Volkov summed up this period of his life in his diary: “The road to Realism. Themes of mountain villages. Fergana. Chaikhanas”. The complexity of these experiments, which soon led him away from the mainstream of Soviet art, resulted in the artist being accused of wandering the “labyrinth of formalism”, which had already been noted in his cycle of “musical” compositions of the 1920s.In terms of subject-matter Listening to the Bedana is a direct continuation of the artist’s celebrated masterpiece Listening to Music, but at the same time there is much in it that relates to the composition of his equally well-known Chaikhana paintings. Here the artist again tackles his two favourite motifs in the same picture, those of oriental tea-drinking and music-making. By portraying them in close-up, Volkov demonstrates his characters’ detachment from everyday life and their concentration on enjoying the music. Despite the simplicity and prosaic nature of the subject matter, this is not a genre scene set in a chaikhana but rather an epic work. We are witnessing not simply tea-drinking, but a silent, meaningful conversation between three worldly men: this work, which is extraordinary for its emotional expressiveness, is thereby raised to the level of a metaphorical depiction of the theme of music awakening the human soul. In the 1920s the artist was seized by an interest in folk culture and a sense of affinity with his national heritage. He was captivated by the sounds of the bazaars and provincial streets and it is thus music that is the quintessence of his best works of that period.In this scene Volkov is consciously avoiding the plethora of oriental sounds and colours which characterise his more primitivist version of Listening to the Bedana, Singers-Uzbeks and Chaikhana. Listening to a Song. The protagonists’ robes and skull-caps, imbued with shadows and coloured highlights, are austere and without a great deal of colour. The conceptual and colour focuses are provided by the bedana in its white cage hanging against the background wall in the upper right; the shining face of the central figure, lost in the song of the quail and the sound of the dutar; and the dutar itself, its pearshaped, mulberry-wood body transformed into an immaterial conglomeration of luminous colour.One role of the chaikhana is to bring peace, to offer rest and the time for reflection. For this reason everything in this picture remains faithful to everyday life and is accurate in terms of volume, space and what is depicted. A sense of music is conveyed with extraordinary precision by the simplest, most economical of means. We have the impression that Volkov’s work is pictorially reproducing the accidental musical ensemble created by the singing bird and the dutar accompanying him, the rhythm of which is based on monody and monophony and has the same hypnotic effect as the song of the quail which is valued in Central Asia for its loud, monotonous, continuous cry. There are no details, no decorations. The only three people in the world have been united by the music. One is playing the dutar, another raises a tea-bowl to his mouth and the third, clothed all in white, is sunk in the contemplative meditation of Sufism. The dark background of a wall, from which melons stand proud against the background with the bedana (the same word in Uzbek signifies both the quail and the cage which holds him), emphasises the precision of the men’s silhouettes and the extreme dynamism of the vibrant colours used for their faces.The artist concentrates all his attention on the economically rendered, powerful masses of the human figures. These are human monoliths. The forms of their bodies are simply-rendered and sculptural, “fluid” and yet full of energy, like a coiled spring. At the same time all the protagonists have some kind of superior strength, especially evident in the treatment of the hands, reminding us of the forms of Picasso’s Neo-Classical period. It is no coincidence that the art historian Aleksei Sidorov noted as early as the 1920s that “in many of Volkov’s pieces there is more of Paris than of Tashkent, more of Matisse and Picasso than of the oriental rug”.Fusing together the local colour of his native Uzbekistan with experiments in the new figurativeness art that was prevalent in the second half of the 1920s, Volkov proved to be in tune with the international hunger for this new objectivity, endowing Listening to the Bedana with a supra-national significance.
Lot 14
* KUSTODIEV, BORIS 1878-1927 Merchant`s Wife , signed and dated 1923. Oil on canvas, 97.5 by 77 cm. "Provenance: Private collection, 1924-1998.Anonymous Sale; The Russian Sale, Sotheby’s London, 19 February 1998, Lot 90. Private collection.Authenticity certificate from the expert V. Petrov.Exhibited: The Russian Art Exhibition, Grand Central Palace, New York, 1924, No. 421 (label on the reverse).Literature: Die Dame, No. 19, June 1924, p. 11, illustrated.Exhibition catalogue, The Russian Art Exhibition, New York, 1924, No. 421, listed.V. Voinov, B.M. Kustodiev, Leningrad, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925, p. 87, listed.M. Etkind, Boris Kustodiev, Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1982, p. 232, No. 645, listed.Russian merchants’ wives are without doubt among the most memorable and recognisable images in Boris Kustodiev’s oeuvre. Painted in 1923, the present work was conceived as a kind of continuation and development of the celebrated 1915 work of the same name, which now occupies pride of place in the Russian Museum. The subject is recognisable, as is the protagonist’s pose — as if in a state of suspended animation before the viewer — and even the details: a shawl over her shoulder and handkerchief in her hand. However, what we have before us is not merely the artist’s retrospective attempt to outdo himself at a successful subject. His pictures of merchants’ wives of the early 1920s, painted at a time of tumultuous and dramatic events in Russia, play a far more symbolic role and are of far greater significance than would at first appear. Imbued with nostalgia for the dignified patriarchal society that was by then gone for ever, these portraits of archetypes became a kind of symbol of early 20th-century Russia.Of course, Kustodiev’s romantic view of his homeland, based on an aesthetic fondness for the past and a poetizing of its images, is interwoven with elements of stylisation, as were the images of his old World of Art comrades. Kustodiev’s languid, contented merchants’ wives are as different from their real-life prototypes as Somov’s saucy marchionesses. Boris Kustodiev’s bright, festive, carefree, big-hearted peasant Rus became for him a kind of dream of Russia, as she had at no time, in no place existed but as she unwittingly appeared when looking back from the bleak, cold-hearted Petrograd of the 1920s. For this very reason the best-known merchants’ wives works were done during the Civil War and the destruction that followed when the Kustodiev family, like many others in Russia, were forced to sell their belongings and queue for bread. The hunt for a ripe watermelon in that half-starved city, for the famous Merchant’s Wife Drinking Tea, was a real feat for the artist’s wife Yulia Yevstafievna.The artist had long dreamed of creating a universalised image of Russian beauty, for in the 1910s none of his contemporaries had set themselves such a task. When Kustodiev found his ideal of female beauty he was already an established and recognised artist, and he invested all of his creative genius and the searing power of bright, full-blooded colours into these merchants’ wives. Once seen, you cannot forget these magnificent, corpulent women, their figures towering majestically over a Volga townscape, which fades into the background, eclipsed by their ripe beauty.Yet, at the same time Kustodiev’s beauty is only a fruit of the imagination, a splendid mirage appearing before a European, a World of Art member, along with the legends of the city of Kitezh and the firebird’s feather, from the exotic life of the deep provinces. It is no accident that the ladies who modelled for the sketches of practically all Kustodiev’s merchants’ wives were members of the intelligentsia. One of the models for the Merchants’ Wives of 1912 was the European-educated Natalia Zelenskaya, whom Kustodiev had met in Switzerland. He used a pencil and sanguine sketch of the young actress Faina Shevchenko, done at a premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre, as the basis for his picture Beauty (1915); for Girl on the Volga (1915) the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, Pazukhin, sat for him; the model for Merchant’s Wife Drinking Tea (1918) was Galina Aderkas, a student at the medical institute, who lived nearby; and, finally, the model for his celebrated Russian Venus (1925-1926) was his own daughter Irina. However, when sketching a real individual for one of his protagonists, Kustodiev would always create the specific character he needed and which was frequently rather different from the original. The Merchant’s Wife of 1923 belongs to this group of splendid female types.It should be noted that all the artist’s paintings of this subject, in their various guises and different formats and sizes, were not conceived as parts of a single, unified series. So it is that each one of them — be it the 1920 Merchant’s Wife Taking a Walk (Russian Academy of Fine Arts Museum) or the 1923 Merchant’s Wife — represents an intrinsically valuable and unique variation on the composition, of which Kustodiev painted many. All, with the exception of the work offered here, are either long settled in museums and private collections or lost without trace. Today Kustodiev’s various merchants’ wives adorn the collections of the Russian Art Museum in Kiev, the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery and several other Russian museums, as well as the best private collections. The portrait of collector and painter Isaak Brodsky attests to the popularity of this image. Kustodiev depicted him walking in a Petrograd in the grip of famine and destruction during the terrible years of the Civil War. Lost in thought and with a dreamy expression on his face, the artist carries a Kustodiev Merchant’s Wife under his arm, oblivious to what is going on around him.The Merchant’s Wife of 1923 was already widely-known during the artist’s own lifetime. He showed the work a year after it was painted, at the celebrated Russian Art Exhibition, organised by Igor Grabar and Sergei Vinogradov, which was housed at the Grand Central Palace in New York, before travelling around a good many of the central and southern states. The exhibition opened on 8 March 1924, and many of the paintings sold successfully, including the Merchant’s Wife, which was acquired by a private collector. Soon after the exhibition, the much admired picture of the young and smartly dressed beauty out for a walk, appeared in the pages of the popular German women’s magazine Die Dame. The picture remained out of public view until 1998, when it sold successfully at Sotheby’s. Today, for the first time in many years, it is again offered for sale and presents a rare opportunity for even the most exacting collector of Russian art. This painting is undoubtedly among Kustodiev’s most iconic works."
Lot 835
A Chinese, Kangxi, famille verte tea cup with floral panels, floral mark 6.5cm x 4cm, two famille rose tea bowls, a pair of famille verte and underglaze blue saucers and a set of three cups and saucers decorated in famille rose with fisherman`s family, the mother breast feeding her child. Qianlong (defects).
Lot 387
A Victorian plated entrée dish and cover with warmer base, of rectangular form with fluted decoration and gadrooned borders, the interior with tree and well, together with an Elkington & Co. plated four piece tea set, comprising teapot, spirit kettle and stand, milk jug and sugar bowl and a plated on copper jug.
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