Konstantin Andreevich Somov, 1869-1939

Acquired directly from the artist by Nadezhda Evseevna Dobychnaya (1884-1949), the founder of the St. Petersburg Art Bureau

St. Petersburg, The State Russian Museum, Konstantin Andreevich Somov: celebrating centenary of his birth, 1969
Moscow, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Konstantin Andreevich Somov: celebrating centenary of his birth, 1969-1970

Iu.N. Podkopaeva and A.N. Sveshnikova, K.A.Somov. Pis'ma.Dnevniki. Suzhdeniya sovremennikov, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979, pp.217, 393, 566, 590
V.N. Petrov and A.A. Kamenskii, The World of Art Movement in early 20^th-century Russia, Leningrad, 1991, p. 249, listed under works from 1923

Original canvas. The painting is clean and ready to hang, the uv light reveals a few minor spots of retouching along the edges. Held in a gold-painted plaster frame, unexamined out of frame.
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To be sold with a copy of Pis'ma. Dnevniki. Suzhdeniya sovremennikov.

Painted in 1923, this exquisite still-life encapsulates the dominant interests of Konstantin Somov's life: art, porcelain, literature and nature, and reflects his elegant taste and wide culture. He was born in St. Petersburg in 1869 into a family of refined taste and great artistic sensibility. His father had been senior curator at the Hermitage and was a great collector of the Flemish masters. Somov, too, inherited a love of objects and in a photograph from 1900 (fig. 1) he is shown surrounded by the trophies of his endeavours as a collector of antiques and books. Although he only made one design for the stage, he did create a number of costume designs for Pavlova in 1909 and again during the 1920s, as well as some motifs for embroideries.

Somov was a leading exponent of The World of Art or Mir Iskusstva group, which was formed in St. Petersburg in the late 1890s under the aegis of Sergei Diaghilev and whose goal was, as he said, to "[exalt] Russian art in the eyes of the West", uniting the finest Russian artists and helping them to achieve global renown. The group was formed from a select circle of young students dominated by Alexander Benois, the writer, artist and critic; Dimitri Filosofov, the writer; Walter Nouvel, a budding music critic; and the young Arts Academy student himself, Konstantin Somov. They were later joined by the young artists Lev Rosenberg (Leon Bakst) and Evgeny Lanceray. This group united against the dreary traditions of the Academy and founded The World of Art Journal which came out for six years from 1899 to 1904 and was the ideological centre for early twentieth-century Russian art. Diaghilev went on to organise a number of exhibitions for the group, in which painters such as Somov became key figures in shaping the movement and revolutionising the aesthetic outlook of most of the Russian intelligentsia of the time. By 1924 the group had surpassed its objectives and its members went their separate ways.

Somov was a precociously gifted painter, producing his finest works while still a young man. He was a master at visually poeticising the past in his historicising landscape paintings, as well as being a gifted portraitist. He created a wonderful portrait of his fellow painter, Anna Ostroumova Lebedeva, in 1901 and further striking depictions of members of the intelligentsia, such as the poet Aleksandr Blok in 1907 and the composer Rachmaninov in 1925. By 1910, Somov was a famous artist feted by the Establishment. It was de rigueur for families of taste to own one of his miniatures. However, just as his fame was reaching its apogee, he became more and more isolated and lost contact with his former World of Art colleagues. Unmarried, he retreated to his apartments on Ekaterinsky prospect and, as Prince Shcherbatov was to recall, his environment reflected his soul:

"...antique mahogany furniture of the 40s, on the elegant chest of drawers and table one or two perfect and valuable old Saxony and Meissen figurines, miniatures on the wall, little Louis Phillipe vases, a single beautiful flower" (V. S. Shcherbatov, Khudozhnik v. ushedshei Rossii, p. 118, quoted in John E. Bowlt. "Konstantin Somov", Art Journal, vol. 30, no. 1, autumn 1970, p. 33.)

Indeed, Somov had a passionate interest in the manners and motifs of eighteenth-century life. Even his highly refined technique of building up a vibrant colour-plane through small, deft dabs of colour harked back to an eighteenth-century tradition. Somov, like Benois and the other painters of The World of Art, disdained the Slavophile themes of nineteenth-century history painting. They were more attracted by the historical themes of Europeanised Russia and the eighteenth century: Peter the Great, St. Petersburg, Pushkin and "beyond their homeland" Versailles, Goethe, Hoffmann and the Italian Commedia dell'Arte were all elements that held high idiomatic value for them.

In the present exquisite work, Somov meticulously depicts the details of the objects before his gaze, whilst retaining a decorative sense of colour. This interior scene betrays Somov's tendency to imbue inanimate objects with a heightened emotional meaning whose precise nuances can only be decoded by the viewer when one understands something of his biography. Somov had an ambivalent attitude towards women. Indeed, he went so far as to admit in a diary entry from 1914 that he had no "love for, or interest in, people [and experienced] great sadness as a result" (see John E. Bowlt, The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early Twentieth Century and the "World of Art" Group, Newtonville, Mass., 1979, p. 212).

Another still-life created just over a decade later than the present composition, Still Life. Window. Landscape (Fig. 2, 1934) is again characterised by a cluster of objects that act as vehicles through which Somov narrates his life, and the composition is dominated by an open window, revealing a tantalising landscape beyond the interior. A yearning for liberation from the shackles of the material and the mundane, a desire to escape the isolation of his own small world of comfortable solitude, can be read in much of Somov's work.