Petr Iosifovich Smukrovich

Acquired by the present owner from Douwes Fine Art in 1997

St Petersburg, The Imperial Academy of Arts, Otchyetnaya vystavka Vysshego khudozhestvennogo uchilishcha pri Imperatorskoi Akademii khudozhestv, 1913
Minneapolis, The Museum of Russian Art, Windows into the Russian Soul, 25 September - 23 December 2003
Minneapolis, The Museum of Russian Art, Russian Realism: Paintings from the 20th Century, 31 August - 30 December 2006
Minneapolis, The Museum of Russian Art, The Art of Collecting, 29 March - 7 September 2014

'Otchyetnaya vystavka v Akademii Khudozhestv', Apollon, no.9, November 1913, p.68 mentioned in the review

Original canvas which is slightly loose on the stretcher. There are a few fine lines of craquelure in places, including to the white drapes in the lower left, and faint stretcher bar marks. There is some ingrained dirt along the lower edge. UV light reveals a few spots of retouching in places in the upper half and left-hand side. Held in a painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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The most important recorded work by Petr Smukrovich, this sumptuous large-scale painting drew the attention of critics at the 1913 graduation show of the Imperial Academy of Arts with the Apollon reviewer singling it out as the most accomplished work that year and praising its technical virtuosity (Apollon, no.9, 1913, p.68). Smukrovich’s noble family roots would become problematic for his advancement as an artist under Bolshevik rule and he would eventually be restricted to teaching, but Toilette was painted at a time when the artist was free to hark back to the era evoked by Konstantin Makovsky’s genre scenes, to delight in rich materials, explore the time-honoured servant-mistress motif and create a Russified version of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). The intimate and decorative qualities are at the same time redolent of the World of Art movement, such as the bright and erotically-charged watercolours of his contemporary Konstantin Somov.

In 1897 Smukrovich enrolled in the Baron Stieglitz School for Technical Drawing in St Petersburg, where his earliest commissions were for decorative designs for the city’s churches including doors for the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. From 1905 he studied under Dmitry Kardovsky at the Imperial Academy of Arts alongside Boris Anisfeld, Alexander Yakovlev and Vasily Shukhaev, whose friendship brought him into the orbit of former World of Art members. Soon after graduating Smukrovich was conscripted and joined the Izmaylovsky regiment, the same regiment in which Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin served. The watercolours that he brought back from the Turkish front were published in Niva and Lukomorye. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Smukrovich returned to Petrograd where he worked on designs for public celebrations including those produced for the first anniversary of the Revolution in 1918 which are in the collection of the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg.

We would like to thank Vitold Smukrovich, the grandson of the artist, for providing additional cataloguing information.