Lot 15
  • 15

Constantinos Parthenis

Estimate
30,000 - 50,000 GBP
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Description

  • Constantinos Parthenis
  • A lady of the Belle Epoque (Portrait of the artist Sophia Laskaridou)
  • signed, inscribed and dated Wien. 900 upper left
  • oil on canvas
  • 59.5 by 30cm., 23½ by 11¾in.

Provenance

Sale: Stavros Mihalarias Art, Athens, 1 March 1988, lot 125
Private Collection, Athens

Literature

Evgenios Matthiopoulos, C. Parthenis, Athens, 2008, p. 125 & 415, no. 13, illustrated

Catalogue Note

Painted in 1900.

Standing at three-quarters to the viewer, with arms and umbrella forming right angles, the artist Sophia Laskaridou confidently eyes the viewer. Parthenis has sensitively depicted the play of the light on her coat, giving them depth with vertical, delicately toned strokes.

Parthenis would have travelled within similar circles as the prominent Viennese Symbolist, potentially through connections with the Macedonian philanthropist and patron of the arts Nicholas Doumbas (1830-1900), who donated Vienna's Musikverein to the city, and commissioned Klimt to paint an iconic image of Schubert in his music room. 

The cross-pollination of ideas and styles that was occurring between artists of various nationalities in Vienna at the turn of the century informed Parthenis' work. The emergent styles opened the modernist floodgates within the scope of the Hellenistic aesthetic of the fin de siècle, allowing theoretical and visual space for the artist to develop an inimitably Greek visual expression later in the span of his oeuvre.