Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev

Galerie Pesaro, Milan
Sale: Christie's, London, October 6, 1988, lot 476, illustrated
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, New Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev, 1924-1925, no. 8
New Rochelle, Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, The Russian Experiment: Master Works and Contemporary Works, September-October 1990 

New Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev, New York, 1924-1925
Alla Rosenfeld, The Russian Experiment: Master Works and Contemporary Works, New York, 1990, p. 7, illustrated
Serge-Aljosja Stommels, Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev, Nijmegen, 1993, p. 69, pl. 36, illustrated
Tamara Galeeva, Grigoriev, St. Petersburg, 2007, pl. 177, illustrated

This painting is still on its original stretcher but the tacking edges on the top and bottom have been reinforced and there are two patches on the reverse addressing small losses in the upper left in the sky and trees. The picture is clean and has been fairly recently restored. There are retouches in the sky, which are not particularly accurate, and also in the trees in the upper left. There are a few spots of retouching in the center left and on the side of the house at center right, but there are no other evident retouches. Although some of the original paint shows fairly strongly under ultraviolet light these areas do not correspond to any restorations and the picture can either be hung as is or the restorations can be re-examined and improved. 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 1920s were extremely productive years for Grigoriev, for he traveled frequently and created a prolific canon of paintings. Above all, the decade marked his introduction to the world outside of Russia; he spent extensive time in Germany, France, the United States and even Chile, and his fame preceded him everywhere he went. He began to exhibit widely, and his works were promoted by the likes of Christian Brinton, legendary curator and supporter of Russian émigré artists. Grigoriev was soon able to support himself by selling his paintings to wealthy collectors in Western Europe and America, and in 1927 he moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer where he built a house he called Borisella, a combination of his name and that of his wife. Though he continued to travel until his death in 1939, he painted the majority of his later canvases, including the epic Visages du Monde, at home at Borisella.

The present lot was executed in the summer of 1924 in Pont-Aven, Brittany, where Grigoriev lived with his family and painted at the villa Ker-Anna. It was over the span of that summer that he painted his Brittany cycle, a series of paintings and works on paper that depicted the landscape and faces he encountered there (including fishermen, their wives, children and the elderly). He felt this part of France to be a land "of druids, soothsayers, judges and medicinists, who have studied the movement of the planets and mastered the art of calligraphy" (Poslednie Novosti, Paris, no. 3436). Like Gauguin before him, Grigoriev was spellbound by the severe landscape, its history and its pious people, who somehow seemed to have passed through the ages unchanged. At the time it was a widely accepted notion that the Breton peasants had escaped the evils of modernity, existing rather as sacred vessels of primitive traditions, and so it makes sense that Grigoriev found similarities between the Breton peasants and their Russian counterparts.

Pont-Aven, Evening is one of a series of three Pont-Aven lanscapes by the artist. All three (Morning, Midday and Evening) were exhibited in Grigoriev's solo exhibition in New York at the New Gallery in 1924-1925.