Konstantin Fedorovich Yuon

Acquired by Alexander Schick (1887-1968) in Russia in 1923
Thence by descent to his grandson

Possibly Moscow and St Petersburg, 9^th Exhibition of the Union of Russian Artists, 1911-1912, Lunnaya noch’ v Troitskoi lavre. Zima. 

Structural Condition: The canvas has been lined and is securely attached to a relatively newly-made keyed wooden stretcher. This is providing an even and stable structural support. Paint Surface: The paint surface has a relatively uneven varnish layer. There are a few tiny scattered paint losses to the paint surface. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows some scattered retouchings, most notably intermittent retouchings along the lower horizontal edge, some small, scattered retouchings within the sky including a retouching in the upper left of the composition and retouchings close to the centre of the upper horizontal edge, small retouchings within the buildings towards the centre of the composition and a small retouching on the right of the centre of the composition. Summary: The painting would therefore appear to be in reasonably good condition and would benefit from cleaning, restoration and revarnishing including the infilling and retouching of any minor paint losses mentioned above.
"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."

A lawyer by profession, Alexander Schick was born into a well-to-do merchant family with a house on Tverskaya, studied in Heidelberg and Moscow universities, and was heavily involved in the cultural life of the Russian capital in the 1910s. He wrote for local and foreign journals and was interested in the Mir iskusstva and Bubnovy valet movements, becoming acquainted with Kustodiev, Sudeikin, Benois, Lentulov and Yuon among others. While living in Russia he collected works by  a wide range of artists – Chagall, Konchalovsky, Lentulov, Nesterov, Sudeikin and Benois to name only a few – and each purchase was meticulously recorded in his collector’s notebook (figs.1 and 2). The payment for the present work is noted in dollars since Schick was working for the American Relief Administration in Russia between 1921 and 1923.

Schick was firmly opposed to the Bolshevik cause, was jailed briefly after the Revolution, and managed to send his wife and daughter to Riga in 1923. The following year he joined them, bringing with him 30 paintings from his collection. The family settled in Berlin initially, and in 1933 moved to Paris where he became a well-known figure of the émigré Russian community. He counted Ivan Bunin, Natalia Goncharova, Serge Lifar and Boris Zaitsev among his close friends. Perhaps his most famous friendship was with Marc Chagall with whom he corresponded closely between 1930 and 1967 (see Russkaya mysl’, no.4134, July 1996 for an account of the published letters). After the Second World War he continued to publish as a Russian literary and artistic critic mainly in Russkaya mysl' and other émigré American and Western European journals.

The Trinity and St Sergius monastery is among Konstantin Yuon’s more famous subjects. He approached it from numerous viewpoints, at different times of day and throughout the year (fig.3). Even so, few known works depict the monastery by night, the challenges of darkness being obvious. The scarcity of these moonlit views allow us to presume the present work may well be the painting of the 1911-1912 exhibition listed as belonging to one Ya.F.Feigin, St Petersburg. 

The muted moonlight allows Yuon to draw our focus toward the glow of artificial light within the buildings; the warm yellows and reds in the windows are very characteristic of works from this period, for example, Zimka (1910), and the long cast shadows in some ways prefigure the orange and red light shafts of his later work, A New Planet (1921). The thinly applied paint of the smoke and the crosses, the long green and blue streaks to the brushwork on the rooftops, the strands of impasto at the edges of the longer brush-strokes and the complex construction of the several receding planes are compelling technical hallmarks of Yuon’s idiosyncratic technique.