LONDON.- A lost masterpiece by the Russian landscape painter Alexei Savrasov, The Volga near Yurevets, will be offered as one of the star lots of Sotheby’s Russian Pictures sale on 2nd June 2015. Last exhibited in 1871, the work was known only from a black and white photograph until its rediscovery in France last year. Widely considered one of Savrasov’s finest paintings and documented extensively in the literature on the artist, it is his most important work to appear at auction (est. £1.4-1.8 million).

Jo Vickery, International Director of Russian Art ‘The reappearance of this landmark work by one of the masters of 19th century Russian art is momentous. Had the work entered a Soviet museum collection in the 20th century it would likely have become a well-loved and famous icon of 19th century Russian landscape painting.

One of the real privileges and excitements of handling Russian art is the number of long-lost paintings which resurface on the market many decades, if not a century, since they were last seen. This summer our pre-sale exhibition in London will unveil not only ‘The Volga near Yurevets’ for the first time, but a number of other works not seen in public for generations.’

“The Volga near Yurevets”
Depicting barge-haulers working along the River Volga beneath an advancing storm, The Volga near Yurevets was first unveiled in February 1871 to great critical acclaim at the annual prize contest of the ‘Moscow Society of Art Lovers’. Winning the artist first prize in the landscape section, the painting remained on permanent exhibition in Moscow throughout the year.

This was Savrasov’s first large scale composition on the subject of the Volga river. The painting heralded the beginning of a celebrated series of Volga landscapes in the 1870s after he moved to Yaroslavl with his family. This was Savrasov’s golden decade when he painted his best works, including The Rooks Have Returned (1871) which brought him widespread fame.

An inscription on the reverse indicates the painting was once in the collection of Vladimir Fedorovich Mering, the youngest son of Friedrich Mering (1822-1887), a German professor at the Kiev University and a leading doctor of his time. A wealthy man, Vladimir Fedorovich collected furniture and paintings and is known to have donated Nesterov’s On the Mountains (1896) to the Museum of Russian Art in Kiev in the 1920s. Savrasov’s greatest achievement as an artist was in pioneering a whole new national landscape art, sidestepping the moribund conventions of the Academic salon and creating for the very first time monumental and enduringly beautiful images of Mother Russia in all her different moods and seasons. Savrasov sought to reveal something essential about the daily life and character of the provincial Russian people through vignettes and traces of contemporary human existence scattered through the landscape.

Barge-haulers were a popular subject for several Russian artists including Ilya Repin and Vasily Vereshchagin in the 1860s and 1870s. They became something of a symbol of social injustice following the long awaited and disappointing serf reforms of Tsar Alexander II’s reign.

FURTHER RE-DISCOVERED WORKS TO BE OFFERED IN SOTHEBY’S RUSSIAN PICTURES SALE 2ND JUNE 2015
Nikolai Roerich, Before the Rain (1918), oil on wood, 50 by 80cm, est. £200,000-300,000 Never before reproduced in colour, this panoramic landscape was last exhibited in 1920 at the Goupil Gallery in London. The work was recently rediscovered in a French private collection.

• Petr Konchalovsky, Willows, Landscape with Horse (1923) oil on canvas, 90.5 by 119cm, est. £100,000-150,000
Last exhibited at the Soviet Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1924, the work was until now known only from black and white photographs. It is thought to have been acquired by an Italian collector in Venice and has remained in Italy ever since.

• Ivan Aivazovsky, Evening in Cairo (1870), oil on canvas 110 by 134cm, est. £1,500,000-2,000,000
The painting was last exhibited almost seventy years ago at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1950, and has not been shown in public since. This spectacular view is one of the earliest known Egyptian views by the artist, painted in 1870 – the year after Aivazovsky attended the opening of the Suez canal. In terms of its grandeur and topographical detail, Evening in Cairo is unparalleled.

• Valentin Serov, Nude, pencil on paper, 42.5 by 26.5cm, est. £10,00015,000
Never exhibited before, the appearance of this drawing at auction is a great rediscovery. The majority of Serov’s nude sketches from this period are in the Tretyakov Gallery or the Russian Museum and are smaller in size. This particular drawing was from a 1923 edition of Zhar Ptitsa, an influential Russian émigré magazine published in Berlin, and comes from the collection of Boris Bakhmeteff, Russian Ambassador in the United States to the Provisional Government (1917-1922).