Leonid Pasternak

Professor Charles Pasternak, grandson of the artist, London

St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, XX Itinerant Exhibition, 1892, no. 135
Coventry, Leonid Pasternak Centenary Exhibition of Drawings and Paintings, 1962, no. 6
St. Andrews, Sheffield, Stirling, Edinburgh, Leonid Pasternak 1862-1945, Arts Council Touring Exhibition, 1978, no. 3
Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, Leonid Pasternak 1862-1945, 1982-3 no. 6
London, Leonid Pasternak, The Fine Art Gallery (Wylma Wayne),  1983
Moscow, Tsentralny Dom Khuzdozhnikov, Leonid Pasternak 1862-1945, Exhibition of Paintings and Graphic Art, 1989, no. 5

Khronika, Sovremennoe Obozrenie, Dnevnik Artista, 1, 1892, no.63
XX Peredvizhnaaya Vystavka, II, 1892, no.38
V.V. Stasov, Na vystavkakh v akademii i u peredvizhnikov // Izbrannye sochineniya v treh tomah, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 18 March 1892, review, vol. 3, p. 129 
Shtrikh, 'Na peredvizhnoy vystavke', Odesskiy vestnik, 10 December 1892
Niva , no.41, 1901 reproduced p.633 (engraving entitled Muki tvorchestva)
Pawetti, "L. Pasternak",  Ost und West, issue 2, 1902, no. 6, p. 370, reproduced as German Schöpferstunde
Leonid Pasternak, Zapisi raznyh let, Moscow, Sovetskii Khudozhnik, 1975, reproduced
Rimgaila Salys, Leonid Pasternak, The Russian Years, 1875-1921, A Critical Study and Catalogue, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, Vol. I, p.15, no.46 and Vol II, p.13, (illustrated)

Original canvas which is loose in the stretcher. There is some light surface dirt and small areas of paint shrinkage to the books on the right and left sides and elsewhere. There is a light surface scratch across the neck of the oil lamp. There is some abrasion to the left and right edges as the stretcher is slightly loose in the frame. UV light reveals evidence of some areas of old retouching in places but an opaque layer of discoloured varnish prevents a more conclusive examination. Held in a gold painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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In 1889 Pavel Tretyakov visited Leonid Pasternak's Moscow studio and purchased A Letter from Home directly from the easel, a sale which brought him to the forefront of the artistic life of the time. Ilya Repin sent him pupils to teach. Nikolai Ge hailed him as his successor. His 1894 work On the Eve of the Examination won a gold medal at the Munich International exhibition and is now one of the few Russian paintings in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris; in 1898 he was invited by Tolstoy to illustrate Resurrection.

Surprisingly however, it was only in his mid twenties that Pasternak was able to train seriously as an artist, at the Munich Academy of Fine Art. The youngest of six children from a poor Jewish family in Odessa, he had initially studied medicine and law to please his parents, yet he was to become a founder-member of the group called 'Thirty-Six Artists', forerunner of the Union of Russian Artists, and he became an academician in 1905. In 1921 he left Russia for Berlin where he worked with Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, and other German Impressionists. He always wanted to return to Russia, but with the coming of the Third Reich he and his wife Rosalina, an exceptionally talented pianist, moved to Oxford in 1938. Leonid died in Oxford in 1945.

Rimgaila Salys writes: "In 1924 Pasternak had been looking at the painting which hung at his daughter's and wrote to Boris, 'among the many (not that many) formal deficiencies (from a modern point of view...) how many merits there are – both painterly and in the content itself and the mood and musical tone of the most intimate interior ... With what love, care, and naïveté, almost that of a self-taught artist, the still life of all the furnishings is painted.'

There was much debate over the title of the painting at the 1892 Peredvizhniki exhibition: true artistic creation could not be torturous; perhaps Pasternak intended to satirise contemporary writers? The painting is mentioned in a letter from the artist to his son Boris in 1924: "When I was painting this picture I had read something about Maupassant, about his death or something about the difficulty of his creative work'. In retrospect, he writes, another title might have been more suitable – 'Creative Moments' or simply 'The Creator', 'The Poet', though at the time such titles were unthinkable in Peredvizhniki exhibitions.

Yaroshenko's thematically similar Mechtatel' (pisatel') was shown at the same exhibition. There is a study for the offered painting at the collection of the Glinka Museum of Music Culture, Moscow.