Konstantin Alexeevich Korovin

Collection of Ye.M.Nepalo

London, Barbican Art Gallery; Oxford, Museum of Modern Art; Southhampton, City Art Gallery, 100 Years of Russian Art 1889-1989 from Private Collections in the USSR, 1989, no.88

Exhibition catalogue 100 Years of Russian Art 1889-1989 from Private Collections in the USSR, London: Lund Humphries Publishers, p.54, no.88 listed; p.85 illustrated

Korovin purchased a plot of land in Okhotino from Savva Mamontov in 1897 and built himself an understated wooden dacha that became the setting for some of his best works. He apparently enjoyed the happy disorder of his summers here, with Valentin Serov and Feodor Chaliapin as regular guests; 'Don’t re-arrange the chaos in my life!' was his refrain to those who attempted to interfere.  

As a place where Korovin’s passions for landscape, friendship and sport were able to meet, Okhotino is important. Fishing in particular is a recurring theme in his paintings of the mid 1910s, Fishing on a Sunny Day (1915, fig.3) and In the Boat (1915, Bakhrushin State Theatre Museum). Serov’s famous 1905 portrait of Korovin depicts him gazing out over a river (The Artist K.A. Korovin on the Bank of a River, State Russian Museum). Whether the sandy banks or the coniferous shadows, the present landscape is immediately recognisable as Russian, and it is part of Korovin's appeal that in his handling of colour and paint in his influences he is so recognisably French. Working en plein air with broad strokes of bold colour, he creates a fragile and fleeting composition, the nostalgia of which is enhanced by the subject matter itself.