Lot 80: Alexander Andreevich Ivanov, 1806-1858 , Head of an Old Man and a Nazarene from The Appearance of Christ to the People oil on paper laid on canvas

oil on paper laid on canvas

58.5 by 44cm., 23 by 17¼in.

M.Botkin, 'Spisok proizvedenii Ivanova u chastnyh litz', in Aleksandr Andreevich Ivanov. Ego zhizn' i perepiska: 1806-1858, St. Petersburg: M.Stasyulevich, 1880, p.463 listed as Head of an Old Man and a Nazarene

Mrs Sukhanova, St. Petersburg in 1880
Simon Beilitz, Paris
Private Collection, Israel
Sotheby's London, The Russian Sale, 14 December 1995, Lot 130

The offered lot is a study for the heads of the old man and Nazarene at the right hand edge of Alexander Ivanov's The Appearance of Christ to the People (1837-1857) (fig.1). At over forty square meters, The Appearance of Christ to the People is a masterful exercise in visual drama on a giant scale, as the viewer is taken along a journey of discovery, experiencing an entire range of emotional reactions to the approaching Messiah. Ivanov devoted almost half of his life to the completion of this monumental canvas, producing over 600 studies and sketches in a variety of media as part of his meticulous preparation. As a body of work, which is in fact how Ivanov had planned to exhibit it, the whole of this artistic project represents the pinnacle of Russian nineteenth century Realist art. Ivanov worked in Italy en plein air, zealously producing sketches of every detail of the landscape and people whose features he could use to portray national types. A believer in the transformative power of art, Ivanov placed his humanist concerns about man's individual freedom at the basis of his composition, He wanted to depict an allegorical folk tale, fragmented into its composite legends, juxtaposing Greek, Egyptian and Assyrian subjects. At that time, this was an unprecedented interpretation of a religious subject. Ivanov hardly ever sold his works during his lifetime. Following his sudden death from cholera in 1858, a number of studies were sold in St Petersburg and Moscow where they had been exhibited that very year. However, the majority of the studies were sent to Rome to the artist's brother, Sergei. Most of these were sold after the latter's death in 1877 by Mikhail Botkin, who also compiled a list of those works in private and public collections which he published in 1877 as an appendix to his monograph on Ivanov. Head of an Old Man and a Nazarene is listed as being in the collection of Mrs. Sukhanova in St. Petersburg, which corresponds with the contemporary label on the reverse of the stretcher of the offered lot. Many of Ivanov's sketches were executed on specially prepared paper, which was laid on canvas towards the end of the nineteenth century. With the majority of Ivanov's sketches for this work in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, it is extremely rare to find such a finished study on the market. Its quality and expressiveness is evident when we compare it with a less developed study of the same group Head of a Nazarene and Head of an Old Man in a White Headdress executed on a sheet of almost identical size in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (Inv. No. 2568) (fig.2). The Riga-born art collector Simon Beilitz (1898-1980) emigrated to Paris in 1920, where he continued to expand his collection with Russian paintings and works of art sourced directly from the émigré community and at auction. His collection of Russian art came to be known as one of the finest in Europe. Following his wife's death in the early 1970s Beilitz left France for Israel, taking most of his collection with him. A number of pieces however, were sold at auction before his departure and two were presented to the Louvre.