LONDON, ENGLAND.- This Autumn Christie’s will present an exceptional selection of Russian art, objects and silver of the highest quality in two sales, Important Russian Pictures on 30 November and Russian Works of Art and Important Silver and Gold on 30 November and 1 December. The Important Russian Pictures sale on 30 November 2004 will be led by a director with more than 20 years experience in the Russian field in London, New York and Geneva. The sale will consist of approximately 340 lots, predominantly from the period 1800-1920, and is expected to fetch in the region of £8 million. A top highlight of the Important Russian Pictures sale is Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovskii’s St Isaac’s on a frosty day, an extremely rare treatment of an architectural subject by the artist and an excellent example of his mature work (estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000). St Isaac’s Cathedral, named after St. Isaac of Dalmatia, the saint on whose name-day St. Petersburg was founded, was built over a period of forty years. The towering dome in Aivazovskii’s canvas, gilded with over 100 kg of gold, provides an artificial light source whose rays are diffused by the palpably frosty atmosphere. St. Petersburg is also the setting for a work by the celebrated equestrian artist Nicholas Egorovich Sverchkov, Emperor Alexander II and Kaiser Wilhelm I in a carriage with a view of the Peter-Paul Fortress, St. Petersburg (estimate: £200,000-250,000). Famed for his anatomically correct portraits of horses that were used as breeding standards, Sverchkov rarely tackled historical subjects. This painting, dated 1873, demonstrates the warmth of relations between uncle and nephew, and by implication, their Empires, marking the political entente between the two countries.

The Important Russian Paintings sale boasts an impressive selection of important works by Il'ia Efimovich Repin including a Study of a family portrait, an oil on canvas dated 1905 (estimate: £350,000-450,000). This work features members of Repin’s family in the artist’s apartment at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg where he was director and Head of the School of Fine Arts. The painting was exhibited at the 34th Wanderers Exhibition in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1906. Portrait of Nikolai Evreinov, 1915 (estimate: £100,000-150,000), Repin’s portrait of the prominent Russian playwright was exhibited in the 44th Wanderers Exhibition in 1915-16 and was one of a series of portraits the artist made of leading cultural figures of the time. A later work, The Attack with the Red Cross Nurse, is an oil on canvas dated 1917 (estimate: £250,000-350,000) and shows Repin returning to the socially-relevant and ‘useful’ art with which he had established his reputation as the leading figure of the critical realist school. It is possible that the work was painted as part of a series of patriotic canvases depicting events from the First World War, that were sold to raise funds for the Russian cause. A major attraction of the sale is a highly important selection of Russian works which were in the collection of S.A Beilitz, an extremely discreet and well respected member of the small group of dealers who dominated the Russian art market in Paris after the Second World War. Beilitz enjoyed privileged contacts with art historians, critics and Russian museums and Beilitz is probably the only Russian dealer, living outside the Soviet Union, to be mentioned in the Fedorov-Davydov monograph on Levitan and the Repin monograph by Grabar. Beilitz never learnt to speak French, relying heavily on his wife for contact with the outside world, other than the Russian art sphere. Following her death, he left Paris after donating a portrait of Tolstoy by Pasternak and a watercolour by Briullov to the Louvre, and was befriended by a young couple. In Beilitz’s company the couple were introduced to Russian art and over the years acquired his entire collection, a selection of which is offered for sale.