ALEXEI PETROVICH BOGOLIUBOV | VENICE AT DUSK

Alexei Bogoliubov, a graduate of the St Petersburg Imperial Academy first arrived in Venice in mid-October 1854 and stayed until December. On the 21st November he witnessed the Festa della Salute, a magnificent celebration commemorating the city’s liberation from the plague. In his Notes of a Sailor-Artist, the young Bogoliubov dramatically recalled the solemn appearance of the Doge’s galley and the mass of boats and gondolas on the Canal: ‘The impression was wondrous, specifically at dusk when illuminations were lit along every length of the church, stretching to buildings across the Grand Canal, blurring the layers of soot from the small lamps with the fog from the fading day and setting sun. The splash of oars, the disorder, the jostling of boats – it was all hugely enchanting!’ (A.P. Bogoliubov, Zapiski moryaka-khudozhnika, Samara, 2014, p.76)

Santa Maria della Salute, which was built at the beginning of the 17th century and integrated seamlessly into the architecture of the city, is one of the most beautiful and revered cathedrals in Italy and appears in many of Bogoliubov’s Venetian canvases. The artist confessed that he could have painted ‘not one, but ten variations on the subject’ which by exploiting public demand would have provided him with a steady income, ‘but since that would not be art, but craft, I refrained from further repetitions’ (Ibid.).

The first version of this composition, dating to 1856, belonged to the wealthy merchant A.G. Kuznetsov, later Moscow’s Rumyantsev Museum and is now exhibited at the Tula Regional Art Museum.

For The Eve of the Celebration, Santa Maria Della Salute, Venice, painted in 1867 for the Queen of Denmark, Bogoliubov was awarded the Order of the Dannebrog. For over a century and a half this spectacular Venetian cityscape with its grand procession of gondolas was at the Amalienborg in Copenhagen. In 2010 the painting was sold at Sotheby’s for almost double its estimate (fig.1).

The present cityscape from a private French collection, is most like his earlier versions of the subject. It is painted in the Romantic tradition of the Academy – the dark silhouettes of the cathedral and surrounding buildings, emphasised by the fires of the illuminations, stand out against the clear evening sky. The dramatic lighting, contrasts between light and shade and animated figures of the gondoliers and citizens bring a touch of drama to a conventional panoramic scene. One of five possible nighttime views of the Festa della Salute featured in the literature whose present whereabouts are unknown, it was possibly bought by the wealthy Russian entrepreneur Ivan Varugin or Georgy Eliseev. Two of the other versions belonged to the collection of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich Romanov in Paris and to Bogoliubov’s good friend, the financier Artur Rafalovich in Trouville.

We are grateful to Lyudmila Pashkova of the Radischev State Museum of Fine Arts for providing this catalogue note.