Nicolas Tarkhoff

Petit Palais/Musée d'Art Moderne, Geneva
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Nikolai Tarkhov, 1871-1930: zhivopis, grafika iz sobranii muzeia Pti-Pale, Moscow, 1983, p. 33
Petit Palais/Musée d'Art Moderne, Nicolas Tarkhoff: Impressions of a Russian Painter in Paris, Geneva, 1999, p. 72

This painting has been recently restored and should be hung as is. The canvas has been lined. The paint layer is clean and in healthy condition. The painting may have been painted on paper which has been mounted onto canvas. This is a very fresh and well preserved palette and under ultraviolet light it shows very strongly. There are a few chips of unrestored losses, particularly in the impasto in the tree on the upper left side. The signature is slightly abraded but is otherwise healthy. The small chips could be restored yet other than this no restoration is recommended. 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."

Nicolas (Nikolai) Tarkhoff was born to a wealthy merchant family in Moscow, where he was raised by a French governess. He formally began to study painting in his early twenties, and though he was not accepted to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, he frequently visited the studio of Russian Impressionist Konstantin Korovin, who had an immediate and profound affect on the young artist's development. Even so, Tarkhoff was most impressed by the style of Impressionist painter Claude Monet, whose Haystack in Sunlight he viewed at a French art exhibition in Moscow in 1896.

He first visited Paris in 1898 and then moved there in 1899, where he attended the École des Beaux-Arts and took classes at the Académie Julian. It took just two years for him to develop his characteristic style, and soon he was exhibiting his paintings at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne. Tarkhoff was increasingly influenced by Van Gogh and Post-Impressionism, as evidenced by his typical choice of subjects—rural landscapes and floral still life compositions—and his thick impasto.

Tarkhoff was notably recognized as one of the first pioneers of Fauvism, alongside such well-known French painters Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain. Their style was evidently indebted to Impressionistic tenets, for it often emphasized varying qualities of light as well as broad, visible brushwork, yet their paintings explored a unique and powerful expression of energy, the potent force of pure color. At the Salon d'Automne of 1907, Tarkhoff's exuberant palette led one reviewer to regard him as "part of the younger Bohemian crowd [who] outrage even the Byzantines and our North American Indians with their brilliant color" (as quoted in Eleanor Green, Nicolas Tarkhoff, Berry-Hill Galleries, 1989, p. 7).

His artwork was deemed innovative and extraordinarily desirable, so much so that Tarkhoff was granted solo exhibitions at Galerie Ambroise Vollard (where Gauguin, Cézanne and Renoir had all exhibited) in 1906 and Galerie Drouet in 1909. As early as 1910, an impressive list of collectors had acquired his work, including Ambroise Vollard, Sergei Shchukin, Vladimir Girshman and many others. Meanwhile, he maintained contact with several influential figures in Russia, and he was invited to participate in several exhibitions there; consequently, his pictures were included in the Izdebsky Salon in 1909/10 and the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) exhibitions of 1899, 1911 and 1913. He also exhibited seventeen paintings in the major Russian Art Exhibition organized by Sergei Diaghilev in 1906 at the Grand Palais in Paris.

After such a sudden rise to fame, Tarkhoff's later artistic fate was less prosperous. After a dispute with Vollard in 1910 and conflicts with other Parisian dealers, his sales began to decline. He moved to Orsay and effectively withdrew from artistic society, though he continued to contribute to Parisian salons. However, beginning at the Petit Palais in Geneva in 1980 and then at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 1983, a number of retrospective exhibitions have reintroduced Tarkhoff to a broad contemporary audience. Professor René Huyghe, former chief curator of the Louvre, and several other important scholars have reevaluated Tarkhoff's crucial contributions to the history of art.

The composition Les Travaux des Champs was executed in 1905, at the height of Tarkhoff's career, and it is one of his first renditions in an entire series of rural landscape compositions. A later painting of the same title, dated 1911-1912, now hangs in The State Tretyakov Gallery along with eight other works by the artist.