Lot 404: Portrait of Madame Conrad on horseback

Aleksandr Evgen'evich Iakovlev (1887-1938)
Portrait of Madame Conrad on horseback
signed and dated 'A Iacovleff/1934' (lower right)
tempera on canvas
29½ x 37 3/8 in. (54.6 x 95 cm.)

Boulogne Billancourt, Musée des années 30, Alexandre Iacovleff - Itinérances , March - August 2004.

THE PROPERTY OF A FRENCH COLLECTOR


'After his return from Africa, Iacovleff became increasingly popular for his portraits of eminent Parisian society figures, predominantly done in sanguine, like his African sketches. Some critics were comparing him to David and Ingres, and John Singer Sargent was proclaiming that Iacoveff was one of the two greatest draftsman alove. (We have no record of whom he considered to be the other great draftsman.) The artist who had arrived penniless in Paris less than a decade before could now provide comfortably for his mother and sister, and in the late 1920s bought them a a three-room apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement, off the Avenue Foch, where I was to spend some of the happiest days of my early childhood.'

ibid. , p. 35