Zinaida Evgenievna Serebriakova

Acquired from the family of the artist by the present owner

Original canvas. There is a layer of light surface dirt and lines of craquelure throughout. There are some small areas of paint shrinkage in places. Some pigments fluouresce under UV and there is scumbled retouching all along the lower left edge, from the blue patch to the right of the sitter's knee to the left hand corner, approximately 5cm high at its most extensive. Held in a black and gold frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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The present work is one of the finest large-scale oils by Serebriakova's ever to come to auction, and shows the artist at the height of her powers. In her choice of medium, Serebriakova portrays the volume of the human body with a boldness absent in her pastels. Her subject reclines on a soft bed, evoked with the briefest passages of colour in dove-greys, blacks, mid-blues, crimsons and white, which are reflected in the flesh-tones to create a sense of unity in the composition. In her artless and graceful languor, the model appears in deep reverie, her flushed cheeks hinting at the vitality of youth.

Serebriakova's treatment of light here is masterful. Daylight enters the composition on the left from beyond the picture-plane, presumably through Serebriakova's Parisian studio windows, highlighting the contours of the young woman's body. It falls like a caress and recalls the nudes of Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet. Indeed, Serebriakova had left Petrograd for Paris in the mid-1920s and was undoubtedly influenced by such masters in her adoptive homeland. For Alexander Benois, her uncle and fellow artist, Serebriakova's nudes hold a special place: they are "the chief glory of her work, there is nothing quite like them. In these studies of the female body we find not merely natural quality but a special quality familiar to us from literature and music" (A. Benois, 'Artistic Letters, The Union exhibition' in Rech;, 13 March 1910).

Serebriakova's appreciation of the plasticity of the female form was extraordinary, yet from the mid 1930s she painted increasingly fewer nudes. As her memoirs reveal, several of the Russian girls in Paris who used to pose for her got married around 1934, and without the means to pay for professional models, Serebriakova simply lacked the opportunity to return to one of her favourite subjects.