Pavel Osipovich Kovalevsky

Arthur F. Hamann, Riga and Germany

Original canvas, which has been restretched. There are losses to the paint surface in the lower half of the work in three places and scattered smaller losses elsewhere, although these are mainly confined to the background and foreground. The paint surface is dirty, with fine vertical lines of craquelure throughout. UV light reveals some small patches of retouching along the edges of the work and sparsely scattered retouchings in places elsewhere. There are two vertical lines of retouching in the lower right quadrant and one in the top right quadrant. Held in a simple black painted wooden frame.
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During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, Pavel Kovalevsky was attached to the staff of the Russian Army's 12^th battalion to document the campaign on the Danube for Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, the third son of Tsar Alexander II. The present work depicts a great hero of the campaign, General Iosif Gurko, shown mounted at the centre of the composition. In June 1877, Gurko was appointed to lead the front line troops in the Danube region during the fierce battle against the Ottoman army.  

During the bitter winter of 1877-1878, he led an advance through the near-impenetrable Balkan mountains to secure the pass. After a tough eight-day crossing, Gurko and his men eventually descended and liberated Sofia from the Turks. In recognition of his services during the campaign, Gurko was decorated with the Order of St George 2nd Class and awarded the rank of Cavalry General. The present work is a superb example of Kovalevsky's attention to military detail. The anonymous hooded soldiers recall Vasily Vereshchagin's paintings of the conflict, which feature similar battalions weaving their way through the snowy Shipka Pass.

Kovalevsky headed the workshop for military painting at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts and was one of a group of artists commissioned by Tsar Alexander II to produce paintings of the Russo-Turkish conflict for the War Gallery of the Winter Palace.  The commissioned artists were strictly instructed not to over-exaggerate or fantasise, but to document the events accurately and soberly, and depict the principal figures with portrait-like accuracy. He painted a number of canvases of the war, including The Staff of the 12^th Battalion in Bulgaria and Captured Turks (1878, The State Russian Museum), The 12^th October 1877 (The State Russian Museum), and a close parallel to the present work, The Crossing of Russian Troops over the Balkans (1881), originally in the collection of the Kiev Museum of Russian Art, since lost during the Second World War. The present work may have been a private commission painted in Kiev where Kovalevsky worked in the 1890s.