Nikolai Nikanorovich Dubovskoy

The family of the artist
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Original canvas. The surface is slightly dirty and covered in a layer of slightly yellowed varnish. There is a faint horizontal line visible across the centre of the canvas from a slight stretcher imprint. There is minor paint loss along the lower edge, to the right of centre. There is minor paint loss in each of the four corners, only partly visible within frame. There is a small indentation to the canvas near the centre of the left edge. Held in a gold painted wooden frame with plaster moulding. Unexamined out of frame.
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In the full list of Nikolai Dubovskoy's works compiled by the artist's widow, Faina Nikolaevna, the offered lot is listed with dimensions under the year 1909 as No.107, Twilight (Moonrise in the Park); the signature and inscription on the reverse are analogous with several works painted by Dubovskoy over the decade.

Dubovskoy often left St Petersburg over the summer months to make plein air sketches in the Russian countryside, sometimes staying with Ilya Repin in Siverskoi or in Kislovodsk with Nikolai Yaroshenko. Twilight is believed to have been painted from sketches he made during a trip to a village near Narva on the Gulf of Finland and is beautiful example of the deeply atmospheric landscapes which earned him a gold medal at the 1913 Munich International exhibition four years later.

By this stage in his career, Dubovskoy was considered by many to be the country's foremost landscape painter: a director of the Society of Itinerant Fine Art Exhibitions, his was the only Russian landscape to win a medal at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900 and for several years, Levitan was considered by critics to be simply 'one of Dubovskoy's strongest competitors'. An avid collector of his work, Pavel Tretyakov followed Dubovskoy's creative development closely and famously commissioned a second version of It has Become Quiet when Alexander III bought the original. The final canvas Tretyakov acquired, Quiet Evening, was praised by Russkie Vedomosti's reviewer as 'a poem in gold... the richness of overlapping and interlacing golden tones is extraordinary' - a description equally applicable to the sunset of the present work, Twilight.

His astonishing aptitude for conveying the intangible quality of mood within a landscape made a deep impression on viewers from the outset. One critic described Dubovskoy's painting On the Volga as 'a spiritual symphony', while a younger contemporary, Minchikov, recalls being struck by 'his idealism, or rather Romanticism, an escape from prosaic everyday life, a yearning to transcend reality and escape to a particular realm of thoughts and dreams... His work was a momentous episode in landscape painting. Before him, no one had managed to convey in paint the fleeting shadows towards evening or the last dappled spots of light. A painting was not a cold manifestation of nature, but a vehicle for the artist's narrative, a conversation with nature which allowed the viewer to become steeped with the artist's own experiences' (Y.D.Minchikov, Vospominaniya o peredviznikakh, Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1965, vol.5).