Nikolai Nikanorovich Dubovskoy

State Russian Museum Archives (collection 222, file 23, page 4), Deed of the Distribution of Artistic Works Belonging to the Deceased Professor of the Academy of Fine Art, Nikolai Nikanorovich Dubovskoy, July 19, 1938

This painting is in very respectful condition. The canvas is unlined and the paint layer is stable. Many areas of the paint layer do not seem to have been cleaned, although the sky has most likely been cleaned more recently. In the lower right quadrant there are some pentiments of cows still visible, in particular, next to the white cow there is a cow which has been painted over and which is still quite unstable. Elsewhere in the landscape there are a few flakes of paint which need to be consolidated by the magpies, there are some flakes around the signature in the lower left and a few old restorations in the center of the left side. The sky appears to have been restored in the upper left yet the bulk of the sky seems to be in quite healthy state, with a few unstable areas in the upper right which need to be addressed. The paint layer needs to be stabilized throughout, at which point the cleaning can be completed and the few required retouches may be applied. The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Landscape figured largely in the art produced by the members of the nineteenth-century group of realistically-minded Russian artists known as the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions (or the Peredvizhniki, Wanderers, or Itinerants). Over half the works featured in the Society's first exhibition, held in 1871, were landscapes. A preoccupation with native Russian imagery was in keeping with the movement's objective of developing a realistic, popular, national school of art. From the outset, the Itinerants' landscapes were infused with a degree of realism and an interest in national motifs that separated them from landscape painting as practiced at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. In contrast to the idealized Italianate landscapes of their academic counterparts, the Itinerants' landscapes were characterized by an embrace of the simple and commonplace, rendered in a realistic manner.

Nikolai Dubovskoy belonged to the generation of artists who joined the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions in the late 1880s, after it had become one of the dominant movements in Russian art. He exhibited regularly with the Itinerants from 1886 to 1918. He was appointed a member of the Itinerants' Council, and in 1898 took over its leadership after the death of the former leader, Nikolai Yaroshenko (1846–1898).

During his productive artistic career, Dubovskoy created four hundred paintings and over one thousand studies, including some of the most powerful images of vast open spaces to appear at the Itinerants' exhibitions (works that he referred to as "pantheistic"). It is clear from such quintessentially Russian landscape paintings as Summer Has Ended (1900) that he could conceive of such landscape imagery as a symbol of nationality. Beginning in the 1890s, the artist began celebrating the grandeur and vast expanses of the Russian countryside in epic depictions of the subject. Created in this vein, Summer Has Ended is one of Dubovskoy's mature works, after which he began to enjoy wide acclaim and popularity as a landscape painter. The same year it was painted, he was awarded the silver medal for his landscapes at the International Exposition in Paris.

In Summer Has Ended, Dubovskoy turned to the image of the spare Russian countryside and its "humble" beauty, imbuing the simplest and most unremarkable natural features with a poetry inspired by the artist's love for his native land. This work must be regarded as one of Dubovskoy's finest artistic achievements. The style in which it was painted, featuring expressive brushstrokes and abstracted patches of color, is a striking departure from the naturalism of such late-nineteenth-century Russian landscape painters as Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898). Stylistically and emotionally, the painting also departs from the schematic conventions of classical and romantic models.

Dubovskoy here deployed a lowered perspective in order to monumentalize the scene and increase the width of the panoramic view. He allowed the land and the vast expanse of the sky, rendered in natural tones and realistic detail, to become its own subject matter, creating not a view of a particular locality, but an archetypal, generalized image of the Russian countryside. In fact, Dubovskoy rarely made a point of depicting specific locales, often choosing to give his paintings titles that reflected general or seasonal conditions of nature, as in the present lot.

With its panoramic view, simplicity, and unpretentious content, Summer Has Ended followed a stylistic line of development toward greater realism parallel to that of European painting.

Dubovskoy's realistic rendering of nature in Summer Has Ended seems to coincide with the qualities of landscape painting articulated by Pavel Tretyakov, a leading Russian patron of the arts and the founder of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow: "I need neither richness in nature nor effective use of light: no miracles. Give me a murky puddle, so long as it contains truth and poetry. There is poetry to be found in everything." The revolutionary democrat Alexander Herzen, writing from his enforced foreign exile in 1853, expressed similar ideas about the Russian countryside: "There is in our poor, flat northern nature a moving charm particularly close to our hearts.... Our endless meadows covered with even greenery are pretty in a calming manner. There is in our spreading countryside...something that rings out in Russian song, something that strikes a chord in the Russian heart."

According to Dr. Grigory Goldovsky, the present lot was inherited by Dubovskoy's wife Faina Nikolaevena Dubovskoy in 1938 and is documented as number 94 in the inheritance listing found in the State Russian Museum (collection 222, file 23, page 4).