Leonid Pasternak

Acquired directly from the artist, 1941
Thence by descent to the present owners

Original canvas which is loose in the stretcher. There are some slight indents to the canvas in the lower section. There is a layer of light surface dirt, scratches to the left side of the canvas and pinholes in the upper section. The paint surface is brittle and there are flecks of paint loss in places. UV light reveals no apparent signs of retouching. Held in a white painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Pasternak first met Leo Tolstoy in Holy Week, 1893, the day before the opening of the 21^st Wanderers' exhibition in Moscow. 'Tolstoy suddenly began to look hard at the pictures, as if he were drilling a hole in the air. All of a sudden I had the feeling that his affectionate nature and his simplicity were the result of inner self-discipline and control over his immense personality. I saw the flash and the flare of lightening. I saw a thunderstorm with muffled peals of thunder rumbling behind the storm-clouds. This was the Tolstoy whom I later tried to depict in my profile portrait against the stormy sky' (quoted in J.Pasternak, The Memoirs of Leonid Pasternak, 1982).

 'I always had a special feeling about him, a kind of awe perhaps... I would have sat and looked only at him... neither talked to him nor wanted him to talk, but only look... I told you about my idea, my wanting to paint his portrait – not an ordinary, photographic one, but a 'creative' all-encompassing one. In a word, to create L.N.'s powerful, monumental character! To me he will always be like a force of nature! There is something elemental about him.' (Leonid Pasternak in a letter to P.A.Sergeenko).

He did indeed later 'capture this moment in a masterly drawing' (D.Buckman in Leonid Pasternak: A Russian Impressionist, 1974), and the artist himself was evidently pleased with the resulting composition: he originally made two pastels of this image in 1901 (fig.1); a third pastel was commissioned for Edward Steiner's Tolstoy the Man in 1903, and he made an etching of the image in 1906. According to Rimgalia Salys, Pasternak painted two versions of this composition when he lived in Germany: one in the collection of the Pasternak Family Oxford, the second (the present lot) in a private collection, Cambridge.