Arnold Lakhovsky

Acquired directly from the artist's widow Eugenia by the family of the present owner in the 1950s.

Arnold Borisovich Lakhovsky was born into a Jewish family in Chernobyl (modern day Ukraine) in 1880. In 1898 the young artist was admitted into the Odessa Art School where he trained in the workshops of Kyriak Kostandi (1852-1921), a prominent Ukrainian painter and member of The Wanderers group who formed an artist’s cooperative in protest of academic restrictions, and that of Gennady Ladyzhensky (1852-1916), a landscape painter and member of the Imperial Academy of Arts. After graduating in 1902, Lakhovsky left for Munich to study at the Academy of Fine Arts under Carl von Marr (1858-1936).

In 1904, Lakhovsky moved to St Petersburg to train under Ilya Repin (1844-1930), Russia’s most renowned 19^th-century artist.

While living in St Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire, Lakhovsky would produce many cityscapes representing its most famous monuments, its suburbs as well as views of the ancient city of Pskov. Living in St Petersburg meant having greater access to various groups and societies and indeed Lakhovsky joined the Arkhip Kuindzhi Society (1915), The Wanderers Society (1916) and co-founded the Jewish Arts Encouragement Society, donating a number of his pictures to their charity auctions.

In 1925, Lakhovsky was invited to Paris where he exhibited works at the Jean Tedesco Gallery located at 73 Avenue de l’Opéra. The next year, the Musée du Luxembourg would acquire four paintings by the artist which are today part of the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou. The present lot was most likely painted during his stay in the French capital.

After encountering such success in Paris, Lakhovsky left for New York where he mainly lived of his commissions as a portraitist. Together with fellow Russian émigré artists Boris Grigoriev (1886-1939) and Alexander Yakovlev (1887-1938) Lakhovsky taught at the Art School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the 1930s. The artist would die in New York in 1937.

Later that same year, the Jean Charpentier Gallery organized a memorial exhibition showcasing Lakhovsky’s landscapes. Today his works can be found in the collections of the State Russian Museum, The State Tretyakov Gallery as well as many other museums on Ukraine and France.