Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov

Acquired by Sonia Colefax in the 1920s
Thence by descent

Original canvas, which is slightly unevenly stretched in the bottom right and below the top left corner. The paint surface is quite dirty. There are flecks of paint loss to the bottom left corner with further spots to the tree to right of the house and there is another small chip at the base of the house. There are fine lines of vertical craquelure throught out. UV light reveals sweeping retouching to the sky and a few further spots elsewhere Held in a simple brown frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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The present works by Mikhail Nesterov  and Boris Kustodiev (lots 32 and 33) come from the collection of one of the most unusual and colourful Russian émigrés to have arrived in America in the early 1920s. Sonia Colefax, née Finkelstein, was the daughter of a wealthy merchant with an Imperial appointment, who was known as 'the herring baron of Russia'. She and her siblings were sent to Europe for their education, and Sonia would recall leaving Russia before the Revolution with only her books and school uniform, never to return. In 1922 she moved to New York and commissioned an émigré Russian architect to design a dacha near Oyster Bay on Long Island where she had purchased five acres of land.  It was completed in 1926 and soon became a mecca for Russian musicians, artists, intellectuals and bohemians, as well as American high society figures such as J.P.Morgan junior, who were all entertained by Sonia's resident gypsy singer and catered for by a Russian cook.

Sonia was a great collector and purchased several Russian paintings exhibited at the 1924 Russian Art Exhibition at Grand Central Palace, including an interior by Vinogradov and smaller Nesterov landscape (fig.1), both of which were sold at Sotheby's London in June 2009. The present work by Kustodiev (lot 33) was also in the 1924 exhibition. Between 1924 and 1930 she made five trips to Europe where she made further additions to her collection. Later in life she continued her exotic existence in Los Angeles in a home she named Mechta, which became another centre for actors, singers and dancers.  Her mother-in-law, Sybil Colefax, was the founding partner of the interior design company Colefax & Fowler and a pre-eminent figure of London society.

Sonia's eye was unerring and informed in part with the same nostalgia that one American critic of the 1924 exhibition found in Mikhail Nesterov's paintings: 'the feeling of an older Russia is reflected in the spiritual apparitions of Nesterov, as his figures stand or move among the delicate birch trees...' (The Art News, No. 22, 8 March 1924). Her collection of Russian art of the 1920s includes some of the few museum-quality canvases from this period to remain in private hands.

Mikhail Nesterov completed By the Lake in 1924 during a period of renewed inspiration. The aftermath of the Revolution had been a time of hardship for Nesterov, as he struggled to cope with the changes around him. In 1920 he wrote: 'In the past two years Moscow has changed immensely...Seven thousand wooden houses have been destroyed for fuel... All of my sketches and drawings disappeared except those in museum collections—my only source of wealth. Thank God for the ones that have survived!' (letter to V.K. Menk, 21 November 1920 in A.Rusakova, Mikhail Nesterov I ego pis'ma, Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1988, p.273).

During these years, Nesterov produced variants and copies of earlier compositions, four of which he decided to send to New York for exhibition at the Grand Central Palace. These lyrical and contemplative works epitomise the national romanticism in Nesterov's oeuvre, which tackle the question: whom or what should the Russian people turn to in order to find happiness and serenity?

By the Lake exemplifies Nesterov's masterful depiction of a world that is both romantic and spiritual, intimate and detached. In the present lot, the strong horizontal lines of the landscape are interrupted by the two figures on either side of the composition. The woman to the left is the focal point of the picture; her bright, traditional costume, defiant expression and strong stance bring to mind the words of Maxim Gorky, when describing Nesterov's Girl By a Pond (1923): 'Previously, the women in Nesterov's paintings made you believe they will end up in a nunnery. This one will not. Hers is a road to life.' (quoted in S.Durylin, Nesterov v zhizni i tvorchestve, Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1976, p. 310). To the right, a woman wearing a traditional nun's habit reminds the viewer of the alternative source of inner peace.