IVAN PAVLOVICH POKHITONOV | The Sea at La Panne

Eugénie Wulfert and Boris Wulfert Pokhitonov, Belgium
Boris Wulfert Pokhitonov, France
Private collection, Belgium
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Liège, Palais des fêtes: Parc de la Boverie, Société Royale des Beaux-Arts. Salon Triennal de 1921, 7 May - 26 June 1921, no.382
Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery, Ivan Pavlovich Pokhitonov, 1850-1923, 1963

Exhibition catalogue Société Royale des Beaux-Arts. Salon Triennal de 1921, Liège, 1921, no.382 listed as Marine
Exhibition catalogue Ivan Pavlovich Pokhitonov, 1850-1923, 1963, Moscow, p.31 listed as Spokoinoe more. La-Pann
V.Grebeniuk, Ivan Pavlovich Pokhitonov, Leningrad, 1973, p.70 listed as Spokoinoe more. La-Pann
O.Bertrand, Ivan Pokhitonov: catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre, vol.1, Luxemburg: Belart International Editions, 2015, pp.73 and 125 illustrated

The panel is sound. There are a few minor surface scratches in the left of the composition and a couple of extremely small paint chips in the upper left quadrant. Very slight frame abrasions are visible at the edges and there spots of built-up varnish residue. Inspection under UV light reveals no apparent signs of retouching. Held in a small wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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The present seascape belongs to a small but distinct group of what can be considered Pokhitonov’s most ambitious paintings at La Panne, devoid of figures or coastline features they are pure studies in colour. By this point in his career Pokhitonov had long since achieved wide recognition in Russia – from Pavel Tretyakov to the Imperial family – and indeed in 1911 the Lemercier Gallery in Moscow mounted a large exhibition of 58 of his works, and yet we are reminded by the gentle pastel tones of this seascape just how novel his approach to painting must have seemed to his Russian contemporaries. As Boris Pokhitonov recalls, when his father visited Russia in the mid-1880s, they ‘reproached him for painting in chalk, in other words with colours that were too light. When you think that Impressionism was born in France in 1873, you can understand the gap that still existed at that time between the French and Russian schools’ (Unpublished notebooks of B.Pokhitonov, 1927).