Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev

Property from a Private Collection, Berlin (acquired directly from the artist)
Thence by descent

St. Petersburg, Palace of the Arts (Winter Palace), First Free State Exhibition, April-June 1919, no. 395

This painting has recently been restored and should be hung in its current condition. The canvas has been lined using Beva-371 as an adhesive and is still stretched on its original stretcher. The texture of the paint is unaffected by the lining. There is a very light varnish on the surface. The paint layer is not over cleaned and there is no abrasion visible. There are some small paint losses which occurred while the picture was unlined and which have been retouched. These retouches are visible under ultraviolet light in tiny spots in the mother's dress in the lower left, in a few cracks in the mother's hair and in some cracks and small losses in the upper left. The face of the mother and the child, the mother's hands and the remainder of the picture generally is un-retouched. Despite these few accurate retouches described above, the picture is in very good condition and should be hung as is. The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The year 1918 marked an important turning point in Boris Grigoriev's career. The revolution had brought with it a very public focus on the hardships of the Russian peasantry, and Grigoriev began to travel to the countryside more frequently, observing those he encountered with recharged intensity and an acute eye for realistic detail. He painted portraits of these peasants in a particularly harsh light, revealing them as deceptively strange caricatures, "...realistic not up to 'illusion', but realistic up to repulsiveness." In their faces he evoked the hardships of their work and their lives, and in their eyes he revealed an animalistic determination to survive. The compilation of these portraits became Grigoriev's Rasseia cycle, which was first exhibited in the World of Art exhibition in February of 1918 at the St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) Academy of Fine Arts. Viewers who had seen Grigoriev's earlier work were stunned by the savagery of his new portraits. In the spring of the same year, the artist wrote and published his monumental book Rasseia, in which a selection of the cycle was illustrated. Both the paintings and book attracted immense acclaim, immediately boosting Grigoriev to the forefront of the international art scene.

Mother and Child, a recently rediscovered masterwork acquired directly from the artist and since kept in a private European collection, was executed during this same year. This double portrait is one of only a small number of images the artist created of his wife Ella and son Cyrille together, and its composition expressively captures the intimacy of their relationship. Grigoriev portrays them in an extraordinarily complex light, with soft palette and gentle contours as well as many of the bolder features of his Rasseia cycle, most evident in Ella's contorted hands and Cyrille's captivating gaze. Mother and Child was included the 1919 First Free State Exhibition in the World of Art section at the Winter Palace, where it hung alongside many of the artist's peasant portraits. An earlier portrait, completed in 1915 and depicting the same pair when his son was an infant, currently hangs in the State Russian Museum.