Sergei Arsenevich Vinogradov

Arthur F. Hamman, Riga and Germany

Original canvas, stained on the reverse. There are very minor frame abrasions to the framing edges. There are some very minor lines of craquelure which are entirely stable and not visually distracting. The colours are fresh. UV light reveals minor retouching just below horizontal framing edge in the centre and to the right of the sky. A few scattered retouching elsewhere. Held in a simple slip black frame painted in black. Unexamined out of frame.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Arthur Ferdinand Hamann: The Collector

The present group of ten paintings provide a glimpse of the extraordinary collection put together by Arthur Ferdinand Hamann (1888-1954), a successful Latvian lawyer. Hamann was born into a wealthy German family in Riga. His father was a successful industrialist and member of Riga's Large Guild, his mother a concert singer. Arthur studied in Riga, St Petersburg and Moscow, but returned to Riga to pursue a career in Law. He became a judge and later a highly sought-after lawyer specialising in citizen's rights. He continued to work as a lawyer with the arrival of the Bolsheviks in Latvia in 1940, and as an attorney after the arrival of German troops in September 1941.

Hamann's first wife, Elena Orlova, died childless in February 1940 and in January 1941 Hamann registered a second marriage with Anna Elfrida Saerdars and adopted a daughter, Gitana Charlotte (b.1930). In the autumn of 1944, Arthur and Gitana emigrated to Germany, where Hamann died a decade later. Gitana died in 1993 having spent much of her adult life under medical supervision, and in 2010 Anna Saerdars was officially declared dead. Only then was Hamann's estate sold in Germany, allowing the rediscovery of this small but important collection of late 19^th and early 20^th century Russian paintings which had been kept in storage for over 50 years.

All of the present works from the Hamman collection were held in narrow black frames and a distinctive card backboard, held down on the reverse of the stretcher with identical screws. These distinctive features allow us to trace this to a well-known conservator based in Riga named Karlis Yuryans (1884-1951), who worked from 1919 in the Riga City Art Museum (renamed The State Museum for Latvian and Russian Art after the war). A number of art collections in Riga contain paintings by a wide range of artists which have the same frames and backboards. For more details, please refer to Māksla un Arhitektūra Biogrāfijās, Riga, Latvijas Enciklopedia, 1995, vol I, p.227.

 

Art Collections in Riga in the early 20^th century

The rediscovery of this collection is major event, but its existence is not in itself surprising. Before World War I, Riga was a flourishing city with the third most developed industry in the Russian empire, and the flow of capital into Riga was accompanied by an inevitable increase in luxury goods and objets d'art. After the Russian Revolution, Riga became a centre for Russian émigrés, and again, valuables were brought in, saved from Bolshevik clutches. The 1932 exhibition of 243 Russian paintings from private collections in the Riga City Museum is some proof of the extent of these collections.  The listed owners covers the spectrum of the intelligentsia: businessmen, scholars, lawyers, doctors, scientists, including  A.F.Hamann who contributed four works to the exhibition by Karl Briullov, Alexander Briullov, Albert Benois and Konstantin Somov.

 

Records of Hamann's Collection

No list or catalogue exists of Hamann's collection, but the handful of surviving accounts of his collection make clear that Hamann was a wealthy man and active buyer, and his was not an insignificant collection. It is also known that he loaned works to museums, for example his 1914 Roerich is recorded as being on loan for a month to the Roerich Museum in Riga for its opening exhibition in October 1937.

In a letter of 1964 to the lawyer who was handling the estate, Hamann's sister, Meta Martinson, writes that her brother owned property on 26 Brivibas Street in central Riga and that he had a very important collection of Russian paintings. Another letter from the same year written in Munich by a childhood friend, Helmut Rohwedder, describes his frequent visits to Hamann's home and the family's high living standards – they had their own car and chauffeur for example, and a seaside villa on the Baltic coast at Asari. Rohwedder notes the wonderful anctique furniture in the house, the library and a collection of Russian paintings, including works by Briullov, Shishkin, Klever and Nesterov.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Hamann travelled often through Europe, including Switzerland, France, Belgium and elsewhere. As an active collector, one can suppose that he would have brought some paintings from abroad. It is certainly true that he added to his collection by acquiring paintings from other collections. For example, The Vision of St. Zosima of Solovki by Nesterov, also part of Hamman's collection sold in Germany, is listed in the same 1932 catalogue as belonging to Leo Maskovsky, cat no 122.

Finally, a Kustodiev winter landscape sold by the estate as part of the present collection is mentioned in the diary of the Riga-based artist Evgeny Klimov, who also left Riga in 1944, emigrating to Canada.

"19 November 1941. I asked the collector Gaman [sic] for permission to copy his Kustodiev painting, Winter. He had agreed to this last year, but I was too busy to at that point and didn't get a chance. I wanted to have a go now, but he came out with some snobbish nonsense, resorted to all sorts of jargon about legal practices and so on, and refused. The most annoying thing about all this was his lack of trust. As a collector of Russian art, refusing permission to a Russian artist is a serious matter. You live and learn."

"3 December 1942. After a year of waiting I was lent Kustodiev's Winter."

Vinogradov note:

In the spring of 1928 Vinogradov travelled together with his wife, Irina Kazimirovna, to the Pskovo-Pechersky monastery, where he produced perhaps his most acclaimed series of paintings and sketches. In early 1929, his article In Pechersk Monastery was published in the Riga newspaper, Segodnya. His paintings and sketches were to be included in an album dedicated to the history of the area surrounding the monastery, which was being prepared by Vinogradov's acquaintance and Professor of the University of Latvia, Vasily Sinaisky (fig.1). Page 13 of this album features a colour reproduction of a similar view of the bell-tower (N.Lapidus, Sergei Arsenevich Vinogradov, St Petersburg: Khudozhnik Rossii, 2010, p.175). The composition of the present lot is the same, but there are minor differences in the light, shadows and clouds, and unlike the published version, this work is signed and dated. It therefore seems likely that the present work dates from Vinogradov's second trip to the monastery, when he repeated this successful motif. If, as seems likely, Vinogradov repeated the composition because the earlier version had been sold, then it is probable that the present work was the version included in his 1935 solo exhibition in Riga, listed as no.84 on p.15 of the catalogue: 'Pskovo-Pechersk Monastery. The Bell-Tower'.

Vinogradov was enchanted by the monastery and its magnificent architectural ensemble, commenting upon entering the grounds that he felt as though he had been 'transported instantly into the distant past. It is so picturesque that one wants to paint it and sketch it endlessly'. He was captivated by one building in particular, the Large Belfry, which became the subject of several paintings, including the present lot. In his memoirs, he describes sitting for many hours, listening to the chimes of the bells as he painted. The series is characterised by a strong use of colour and light to accentuate the architectural forms. 'It is a simply marvellous view, as though made from precious stones. It truly is a town of God.'

One work from the series, Beggars near the Pskovsko-Pechersky Monastery, is in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (fig.2).