Ilya Efimovich Repin

Oskar Federer, Ostrava
Seized by the Nazis in 1939
Galerie Vytvarného Umenì, Ostrava
Restituted to the heirs of Oskar Federer in 2007

The canvas has been lined. The canvas is slightly undulated along the upper edge. The paint surface has recently been cleaned. There is craquelure throughout and some abrasion to the paint surface at the corners and edges, including the upper edge. UV light reveals a small patch of retouching at the upper left edge, along the right hand edge and in minor spots elsewhere. Held in a gold painted plaster frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Oskar Federer (1884-1968) was acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent collectors of French Impressionism and nineteenth and twentieth century German, Austrian and Czech art in pre-war Czechoslovakia, and beyond. On 10th January 1932 the Prager Tageblatt wrote: '[Federer] takes an active part in all contemporary issues, and has a reputation for being an ardent patron and supporter of domestic art. His collection of paintings is one of the finest modern art collections in Prague. He is a member of the Modern Gallery curatorial board'.

 

Federer was the General Director of the largest steel manufacturer in Czechoslovakia, the Vitkovice Mining and Metallurgic Company in the 1930s and was forced to flee Czechoslovakia in 1939 with the help of the British Foreign Office. He finally settled with his family in Montreal, Canada, in August 1940. Federer succeeded in taking with him ten works from his collection, including oil-paintings by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet and Renoir. The Nazis confiscated the remaining collection which comprised over 100 pieces including paintings, drawings, watercolours and sculptures from his company villa in Vitkovice, his villa in Prague and his home in Kropacova Vrutice.

 

Approximately twenty-two works ended up in the Gallery of Fine Art of the Municipal Museum of Ostrava by November 1943, when they were given by the regime on loan to this newly-established institution. With the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 and the Communists' rise to power in 1948, the Czech government decided to keep the works in Ostrava and in another public gallery in Pardubice. In 2007, after a ten year litigation, a group of twenty-two works were restituted to the heirs of Oskar Federer who continue his passion and the family tradition of collecting contemporary art.

 

Repin arrived in Paris as an academic pensioner on 10 October 1873 and was to stay there until his return to Russia in the spring of 1876, the year that this charmingly intimate portrait was painted of his infant daughter Nadezhda (1874-1931). This was an exhilarating period for the young student thrown into the crucible of modern French painting and despite concerns from his mentors in Russia, Vladimir Stasov and Ivan Kramskoi, that he was forsaking the national path in his art, Repin was fascinated by, and receptive towards, contemporary developments in Paris. He noted (not uncritically) the bold innovations of the Impressionists and began experimenting with modern urban subjects and the primacy of outdoor sketching. His major work from this period, A Parisian Café (1875, Private Collection) was supplemented with a series of impromptu portraits of his own family, done swiftly and rapidly in emulation of contemporary French art. In July-August 1875 he twice visited a large Manet exhibition at the Durrand-Reul's gallery, after which he told Stasov: "I have done a portrait of Vera (à la Manet) in the space of two hours." (Letter to Stasov, 13 October, 1875) Discussion has since centred on whether he meant a portrait of his wife or his infant daughter Vera, both of whom he painted in Paris, but it is in that spirit of experimentation and the desire to work spontaneously in front of the motif, that he later sketched this warm and informal image of Nadia, her arms extended and fingers flexing as she totters uncertainly towards her father. Typical of his portraits from this period, Repin has eschewed background to concentrate solely on his subject, as he did with his Parisian Portrait of Ivan Turgenev (1874, State Tretyakov Gallery). This small, candid and intimate canvas however is of a different aspect, representing nether academic convention nor public celebrity, but offering instead an affectionate insight into Repin's private life, as well as a staging post in his creative and technical development.

We are grateful to David Jackson, Professor of Russian and Scandinavian Art Histories, University of Leeds, for providing this note and to Elena Kirillina, Director of the Repin Memorial Museum at Penates for her help in cataloguing this lot.