Ivan Pavlovich Pokhitonov

A gift from the artist in 1907 to Eugénie von Wulffert, his lifetime companion
Brussels, Galerie Thémis, 28 June 1957, no.272

Liège, Cercle des Beaux-Arts, Iwan Pokitonow [...], 16 April - 30 April 1910, n°53, Au bord de la Meuse, à Jupille

'Au Cercle des Beaux-Arts', Journal de Liège, Liège, 23 April 1910
V.Petrov, Iwan Pokitonow, Belyi gorod, 2003, p.24 illustrated

The panel is sound, with a hairline crack in the top left and lower left corners. There are some minor frame abrasions with minor associated paint loss to the left and right edges. There are some minor surface scratches and the paint surface is slightly dirty. UV lights reveals small area of retouching in the lower right corner and a few spots of retouching to the trees on the right. The varnishes in the sky and the water fluoresce differently. Held in a gold frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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It is almost as though Mr Pokitonow looks at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, in which the lenses are extraordinarily clear. Great landscapes contract into his small paintings, from views of his native steppe to those of Italy, Campania, the Belgian coast, Bressoux or the riverbanks of our own Meuse in Jupille where he lives.

They are composed with astonishing connoisseurship and taste, with nothing in their execution that is not precise or considered. His clarity of vision is matched by his marvellous mastery of the brush... Their author is a draughtsman who is able to lend his landscapes solidity as well as lightness. His extraordinary sense of harmony and his acute perception of his surroundings is fresh, honest and rich and the nuances of light in his work are splendid. Not a single work betrays the lucid and harmonious character of his work. His ability to convey atmosphere is at once fluid, delicate, subtle detached and yet highly expressive at the same time… such that many Impressionist attempts seem vulgar in comparison... In each of his small pictures, Mr Pokitonow affirms himself as a magician of colour, adept at expressing the soul of the setting and the secret poetry of place.

In his sobriety and exactitude there is a tendency towards detachment, that is to say he paints rather as Flaubert wrote, choosing the right tone, not stating the obvious and refraining from any single impulse who might alter the character of the whole... For an eye like his, there is no such thing as an uninteresting subject, and not a single panel of the hundreds exhibited fails to fascinate for some particular reason of its own. (P.Stellan, Au Cercle des Beaux-Arts, 'Les Tableaux de MM. Ivan Pokitonow et Jean Ubaghs' in L’Express, Liège, 29 April 1910).

We would like to thank Olivier Bertrand, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on Ivan Pokhitonov, for providing additional catalogue information.