Konstantin Alexeevich Korovin

S.A.Beilitz, Paris
Sotheby's New York, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, 3 November 2008, lot 49

This accomplished interior scene is thought to have been painted while Korovin was staying at the Ostrovno estate on Lake Udomlya in Tver Oblast in 1918.  As Benois notes, much of Korovin’s work of the 1910s and early 1920s is increasingly ‘an enchanting spectacle of light’ (see A.P.Gusarova, Moe penie za zhizn’, za radost…, p.28), and the present work is no exception. His use of green and increasingly abstract brushwork as he moves away from the sitter’s face recalls in particular his portrait Lady with a Green Shawl (fig.1), also dating from the late 1910s.

The area around Udomlya attracted a number of Russia’s greatest artist in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, including Isaak Levitan and Alexei Venetsianov and the writer, Anton Chekhov, whose play The Seagull and story House with a Mezzanine is thought to be based on the summer he spent at Turchaninova’s estate at Udomlya.