Alexei Petrovich Bogoliubov

The Mazurin Family, St Petersburg
Arthur F. Hamann, Riga and Germany

Paris, Troisième Exposition Universelle, 1 May - 31 October 1878, cat. no. 14, listed as Saint-Pétersbourg, nuit d'été
Possibly St Petersburg, VIII Itinerant Exhibition, 6 March - 8 April 1880, no.64 

Structural Condition The canvas which is stained on the reverse, is unlined on a keyed wooden stretcher and is providing an even and secure structural support. There is one small patch in the upper right as viewed from the reverse. Paint surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer and inspection under ultraviolet light shows scattered retouchings, the most significant of which are: 1) an area in the upper left of the sky corresponding to the patch mentioned above. This retouching measures approximately 5 x 3 cm, 2) 2 diagonal lines of inpainting also in the upper left of the sky which are approximately 8 cm and 5 cm in length above a very thin diagonal line which is approximately 8 cm in length. There are other small scattered retouchings in the sky. 3) Retouchings in the water in the reflection from the lights and small retouchings in the dark pigments of the harbour wall and the boats, 4) small scattered retouchings in the water in the lower right of the composition and other small scattered retouchings. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in good and stable condition and no further work is required.
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This moonlit view of the Rostral Columns and St Isaac's beyond is one of the largest works by Alexei Bogoliubov ever to have appeared at auction. One of three paintings which he exhibited at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1878, it is among the most important depictions of his native city to have come to light in recent years. The painting may also have been in the 1880 Itinerant exhibition in St Petersburg, since Bogoliubov was an active member of the society and exhibited almost all of his large-scale canvases in the itinerant exhibitions.

Bogoliubov was a born traveller and his foreign cityscapes are well-known: Venice, Amsterdam, Constantinople, Arnhem and Baku to name only a few. Clearly the allure of ports was a strong one for this marine artist and there is little doubt that his youth in St Petersburg provided much inspiration, yet it is curious that few paintings of his native city are known outside museum collections.

By his late forties Bogoliubov had moved abroad due to poor health, but he returned to Russia often. He came to St Petersburg in 1877, where Tsar Alexander II gave him an important commission to paint a series on the Russo-Turkish War, and extended his trip to Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow before returning to Paris in the autumn. The following year Paris was to host the World Exhibition, and Bogoliubov, as a 'Russian Parisian', was nominated to be a member of the Grand Jury for the Russian entrants by the president of the Academy of Arts, Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. His own works was also to be exhibited. Two of his paintings are recorded in the 1877-1878 Report of the Imperial Academy of Arts: 'Professor Alexei Petrovich Bogoliubov painted a panorama of Nizhny Novgorod for His Imperial Highness the Heir Tsarevich.  In addition, he painted a view of St Petersburg for the Paris World Exhibition - the view was taken from near the Stock Exchange on a July night and intended for Mazurin's dining room (the World Exhibition was not a selling exhibition, so this is entirely consistent). This view was shown in the Paris exhibition alongside the study of Nizhny Novgorod' (p.56). The exhibition catalogue notes that Bogoliubov exhibited three paintings under numbers 11, 13 and 14: The Battle of Gangut, View of Nizhny Novgorod and St Petersburg on a Summer's Night. The size of the present work and the Latin signature lead us to believe that it is very likely to be the present work.

The Mazurins were a well-known merchant family.  Mitrofan Sergeevich Mazurin (1834-1880), was a  Moscow-based paper manufacturer, who features in Bogoliubov's memoirs as a 'kind and intelligent man with an interest in art' with whom Bogoliubov is known to have transacted (see Notes of a Sailor-Artist under 1870).

Two other views of St Petersburg from this vantage point are known, but though similar in composition, palette and style, they differ slightly in detail and notably in size. The Stock Exchange, St Petersburg, is an undated and unsigned oil on canvas, (41 by 32.5cm), which was presented to the Saratov Art Museum in 1897 in accordance with Bogoliubov's will (fig.2). The second oil, Moonlit night on the Neva near the Stock Exchange (slightly larger at 46 by 38cm), was painted on panel, signed in Cyrillic and is held in the collection of the Astrakhan Art Gallery. The version in the Saratov museum is very loose and it seems likely to be the original painting on which the other two were based.

It was not uncommon for Bogoliubov to return to a motif more than once if it pleased him; he describes in his memoirs how he painted his study for the view of Nizhny Novgorod, which also appeared in the World Exhibition. "I went to Nizhny to paint those studies from the palace apartments which the Tsarevich Heir had commissioned from me long before. The study was about half an arshin [approximately 70cm]... From this study I made two more.' (A.Bogoliubov, Notes of a Sailor-Artist, quoted in Volga magazine, ed.2-3, 1996, p.50). 

 

Bogoliubov occasionally rated his sketches higher than his finished compositions: 'I never prized my paintings and didn't give a damn where they ended up, but my sketches on the other hand, I was more careful about and even miserly' (idem, p.62). It therefore seems probable that Bogoliubov kept the original sketch of the present view, in order to eventually bequeath it to the museum in Saratov which he himself had founded, where it has remained to the present day.  

The dimensions of the present view are extremely impressive, but perhaps one of Bogoliubov's most appealing traits is his ability to balance grandiose vistas with enchanting detail: the sailor handing up food supplies in the lower right; the horse, silhouetted against the quayside; the characteristic scattered sparks of emerald and golden man-made lights along the shoreline to contrast with the broad-brushed reflected moonlight on the waves and domes – and it is this degree of attention and finish, which his sketches necessarily lack, that has allowed Bogoliubov to become one of Russia's most sought-after artists over the past century.