ALEXEI PETROVICH BOGOLIUBOV | Sunset in Stormy Weather, Menton

Collection of the banker Abram Isaakovich Zak (1829-1893), St Petersburg

Galerie Claude Coissard, Deauville

Sotheby's Monaco, Tableaux et Dessins du XIXe Siècle, 17 June 1989, lot 622

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Exhibition catalogue XIV peredvizhnoi vystavki kartin, Moscow, 1886, listed as Evening in Menton

A.Bogoliubov, Zapiski moryaka-khudozhnika, Samara, 2014, p.246 mentioned in the text in the entry for 1885

Alexei Bogoliubov wrote on more than one occasion that the creation of large paintings was inconceivable without working from nature. In the 1880s he often spent the winter months making studies in Menton, the warmest town on the Côte d’Azur. At the centre of this striking seascape is the ancient coastal fort. The mountainsides darken in the distance and clouds rush across the windy, blue sky. Rough waves thrash the storm wall protecting the entrance to the port. On the other side of the narrow harbour sailing boats are moored. On the enormous boulders the figures of the townspeople and fishermen. As ever, the artist is precise in his depiction of the details of everyday life. With the same sensitivity he renders the transparency of the water by the shore, the reflections of the setting sun on the sea and clouds, the glimmer of sunlight on the windows.

In Bogoliubov’s autobiographical Notes of a Sailor-Artist is a valuable record of this work: ‘In January of 1885 I set to work and by spring had painted two paintings Normandy, Tréport, depicting fishermen on the beach, and Menton, Sunset in Stormy Weather. Both paintings belonged to Abram Zak, a great lover of music and of the arts in general’. In the banker’s St Petersburg house, where he often received Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky and other Russian talents, was ‘a serious collection, of both European and Russian masters’.

In 1886 both of the Bogoliubovs from Zak’s collection were shown at the 14th Itinerant Art Exhibition in St Petersburg and Moscow. The beautiful large view of Menton at evening is mentioned in almost every review of the exhibition. The author of an article in Russkie vedomosti writes at length about the various merits and faults of the exhibits: ‘The most successful work by the famous seascapist in terms of the light effects, transparency and sheer magic of the water, but also the marvellous technical skill is arguably Evening in Menton. The pink glow of the sunset reflecting in the window glass is beautifully and tastefully rendered; only the stones in the foreground are brightly coloured... The near waves are masterfully painted, but the crests of the far-off waves are rendered with such perfunctory strokes...’

A view of the Menton fortress also appears in Bogoliubov’s Menton, Storm (fig.1) now in the collection of the Radishchev State Art Museum in Saratov.

We are grateful to Lyudmila Pashkova of the Radishchev State Museum of Fine Arts for providing this catalogue note.