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Provenance: Daughter of the artist.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Aristarkh Lentulov was well-known figure in the classes of Moscow's most prestigious art schools. In 1918, he began teaching at Moscow's Free Workshops (SVOMAS), where he stayed for two years before entering the High State Artistic and Technical Institute and the Moscow Institute of Fine Arts. Here, he taught from 1919 to 1943. Lentulov was an active member of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia from 1926 and of the Society of Moscow artists from 1928. As a student, Lentulov had trained at the Art College of Penza, near his native village. He had attended the Art School of Kiev for two years before arriving in Moscow. Here, he entered the studio of Expressionist painter Dmitry Kardovsky (1866-1944) for a year. In 1909, Lentulov became member of the Russian avant-garde union of young artists, the Jack of Diamonds(Bubnovy Valet, in Russian), and was one of the organisers for the Group's first exhibition, held in December 1910. The following year, Lentulov went to Paris and studied Cubism under Henri Le Fauconnier (1881-1945), whose works had been shown at the Jack of Diamonds exhibition. In the early 1920s, Lentulov shifted away from Cubism and took on a more naturalistic style of painting. It is also during this period that he began reducing the size of his canvases and using more subdued tonalities, especially for the subordinate elements of his compositions. Lentulov died in Moscow in 1943.