Lot 304: ALEXEI HARLAMOFF RUSSIAN, 1842-1915

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Description: PROPERTY FROM A BRITISH PRIVATE COLLECTION

GIRL WITH CORAL NECKLACE AND SHAWL

48.5 by 36cm., 19 by 14in.

signed Harlamoff l.l.

oil on canvas

This work will be included in the Harlamoff catalogue raisonné being prepared by Olga Sugrobova-Roth and Eckart Lingenauber.

PROVENANCE

Bequeathed by the godmother of the present owner in the early 1990s

NOTE

Painted circa 1902, the girl in the present work was portrayed again by Harlamoff in a similar pose with the same blue dress two years later in a painting housed in the Fine Art Museum of Irkutsk.

Harlamoff was born in Saratov, Russia. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, and won a gold medal and travel scholarship in 1868 for his painting The Return of the Prodigal Son. The stipend enabled him to study in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under the portrait painter Léon Bonnat. Harlamoff's work was exhibited in the Russian section of the Décennale exhibition, part of the Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle. His work subsequently became very popular with Russian and French collectors.

A renowned portraitist in his day, his sitters included Ivan Tourgenev, Tsar Alexander II and Prince Demidoff. However, Harlamoff is most renowned today for his informal portraits of young girls, chosen for their beauty and innocence, as in the present work.