Feodor Petrovich Tolstoy

Acquired from the daughter of the painter Alexandre Benois, circa 1960
Thence by descent

Feodor Tolstoy called his series of still life paintings, obmanka, or ‘trick’ in Russian. His aim was to trick the viewer into believing that the drawn object comes directly from life. Rather than simply reproduce the bird or butterfly or plant, the challenge facing the artist was to create a tableau that would infuse the viewer with a particular emotion. These types of botanical paintings and drawings were quite popular in the early part of the 19^th century, but Tolstoy was truly a master of the form.

In his signatures, Tolstoy indicated that he drew directly from nature, and his vigorous, scientific approach to the subjects is evident in all his still life. One day, he was trying to paint a butterfly and was astonished at its mutability of light—one moment it appeared brown, but then from the side, the impression it gave was of a blue hue— thus Tolstoy created a unique way of conveying its iridescent quality. He would layer different color paints on top of one another, a dot of brown paint, for example, when dried, would be decorated on either side with blue and green paint, and so forth, until a butterfly materialized.  Tolstoy’s attention to the interplay between light and object was one of his unique strengths as a painter.

He was beloved by the most distinguished of Russian society; Empress Elizabeth Alexeevna was especially fond of his butterfly series. She was also so besotted with his images of cranberries that she would commission Tolstoy to execute one of his cranberry renditions whenever she wanted to give a special gift to her royal relatives. “How my cranberry saved me,” Tolstoy often exclaimed. “I am not joking when I say that an entire family was fed by a single cranberry.”

Tolstoy painted on individual sheets of paper but also within albums, the latter immortalized by the great poet Alexander Pushkin in his masterpiece Eugene Onegin:

“But you, grand tomes I loathe with passion,
odd volumes from the devil’s shelf,
in which the rhymester-man-of-fashion
is forced to crucify himself,
portfolios nobly illustrated
with Tolstoy’s brush, or decorated
by Baratynsky’s wondrous pen…”
(as translated by Charles Johnston)

The artist, an uncle to the author of War and Peace, was committed to beauty above all. His strokes were so fine that he at times opted to paint with quills. Indeed, this present watercolor is distinguished for its manner of conveying a delicate splendor, a precision of form, a visceral mood.  “I constantly marvel at the beauties of nature and in all her fragile creations,” Tolstoy once said. His elaborate, painstaking process gives the impression that Tolstoy has transposed the ephemeral onto the page, pinned it down with paint and lent it immortality.