Nikolai Fechin

Private collection, Unites States
Acquired by the present owner in 2014

Taos, Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, Intimate and International: The Art of Nicolai Fechin, 11 April - 21 September 2014

Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and is securely attached to a relatively new, keyed wooden stretcher. The tacking and turnover edges have been reinforced within a thin linen strip-lining. This is providing an even and stable structural support. Paint Surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer. The paint surface has scattered very fine lines of slightly raised craquelure, most notably an arching line within the right cheek of the sitter. These are stable. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows very small carefully applied retouchings on the extreme edges of the composition and some further fine lines of retouching corresponding to lines of craquelure close to the centre of the right edge and in the extreme upper left corner of the composition. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in good and stable condition.
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A superb portrait artist, Nikolai Fechin truly excelled when it came to the genre of child portraiture. His portraits of Olga Belkovich (1910) and Varya Adoratskaya (1914) can be counted among his masterpieces, together with a number of portraits he made of his daughter during the 1920s. He continued to work with younger subjects throughout his career: while living in Russia his models ranged from village children to those from well-off and aristocratic families, alongside the series of portraits he produced of his beloved daughter Eya; once he reached America he enthusiastically set to painting portraits of Native American and Mexican boys and girls; his visit to Bali resulted in a number of portraits of the indigenous children he met there. His paintings of little girls in Russian headscarves bearing simple titles such as ‘Masha’ can be said to represent an entirely separate subgenre in his head-studies of children. These small-scale works, usually found in private collections, are occasionally recorded as black and white photographs in the Fechin family archive. As a rule they are undated but in stylistic terms bear similarities to work from his Californian period (1934-1955), though the prototypes he was drawing on stretch back to his very earliest work such as Sketch of a Girl (1908). The postcard-like format of these Californian images are imbued with the artist’s nostalgia for his homeland, for what mattered to him in his youth. Since America clearly could not furnish him with Russian peasant girls to sit for him, he painted from memory, embellishing and blurring details all the while, in a process which mixed sentimentality with genuine emotion. His talent and craftsmanship did not err with time however, and the resulting portraits convey Fechin’s hallmark style and temperament: a sweet little face is framed by a bright, highly decorative and fully-worked surface, rich with thickly-applied paint.

We would like to thank Galina Tuluzakova for providing this catalogue note.