Robert Rafailovich Falk

The present painting from Falk's Paris period (1928-1937) has only recently been rediscovered in the United States and is therefore not recorded in the artist's 2006 catalogue raisonné. The Seine and its bridges feature prominently in the artist’s work of the time, and as Angelina Shchekin-Krotova later noted, ‘the first landscapes Falk painted in France were of a Paris which he already knew from his favourite paintings by the French Impressionists…’ (quoted in Zhivopis' Roberta Fal'ka. Polnyi katalog proizvedenii, Moscow, 2006, p.538).

Stylistically, the work bears close resemblance to Landscape with Railway Tracks (1931, no.752 in the catalogue raisonné), with its free brushwork characterised by broad, vertical strokes; or Crane on the River (1934, no.830), where he used the same broad brushstrokes to paint the reflections in the water. In the latter, the figures standing on the quay are rendered in a similarly abbreviated way with the underlying paint layer showing through. Comparable figures are found in other Paris landscapes from the first half of the 1930s.