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Dimensions: 90 by 83cm., 35½ by 32¾in.

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Provenance: Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov, Arkhangelskoe
By descent to his son, Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov, St. Petersburg
Aquired directly from the previous owner by Nicholas Lynn, London
Christie's London, Imperial and Post-Revolutionary Russian Art, 10 October 1990, Lot 219

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Literature: S.I.Panchulidzev, Collection of Biographies of the Household Cavalry 1724-1899, vol. IV, St. Petersburg, 1908, pp 319-320
Prince F.F.Yusupov, Avant l'exil 1887-1919, Paris, 1952, ill. opposite p.134
I.S.Zilbershtein and V.A.Samkov, Valentin Serov: Letters, Documents and Interviews, vol.II, Leningrad, 1989, p. 178, ill. opposite p. 225
D.V.Sarabianov, Valentin Serov, New York: 1982, p. 352, No. 548

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Notes: This superb portrait by Valentin Serov is perhaps the most important work by the artist to remain in private hands. Painted in July 1909, it shows Prince Felix Felixovich Yusopov, Count Sumarokov-Elston (1856-1928) in military dress flanked by his majestic mount. The offered lot is one of two portraits of Yusupov painted by Serov: the Prince had already posed for the artist in 1903 and this renowned work now hangs in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (fig.1). Serov spent more than two years painting portraits of the Yusopov Sumarokov-Elston family, one of the wealthiest artistocratic families in Russia. He also painted Prince Felix's wife, Princess Zinaida and their two sons, Felix and Nikolai, at Arkhangelskoe, the magnificent eighteenth-century family estate and at their palace in St. Petersburg on the Fontanka Canal, where Rasputin's body would be dumped following his murder by the Prince's son, Felix on 17 December 1917 (fig.2). Prince Felix married Princess Zinaida Nikolaevna Yusopova in 1882. She was the last in the direct line of Yusopovs, an old and distinguished family who had close connections to the court. Felix was allowed by special decree from the Tsar to take her name and title. Indeed, it seems in doing so that he was following family tradition, given that his father had also been authorized to use the hereditary title of his father-in-law when he married Countess Elena Sumarokova. The Yusopov family owned a string of profitable mines and fur trading posts in Russia and were rumoured to be richer than the imperial family. Zinaida Sumarokova was a renowned beauty and the greatest Russian heiress of her day. Although Serov commented little on the count, he was entranced by the princess. In his memoirs her son Felix recalled that Serov had once remarked that there would have been no cause for revolutionary upheaval in Russia if all rich people resembled the princess. Her portrait took Serov some eighty sittings and three years to complete. Indeed, it seemed he rather enjoyed her company and the resulting portrait is a celebration of her great beauty, female charms and cultivated tastes (fig.3). Serov was one of Russia's leading portraitists and Ilya Repin's best-known pupil. His talents lay in depicting the inner psychology of his subjects without departing from producing characteristically truthful and realistic works. The portraits Serov completed in the last decade of his career are generally considered to be the artist's finest work, and are among his most celebrated. In terms of its rarity and importance to Serov's artistic oeuvre, Yusupov's 1909 portrait unquestionably ranks amongst those of Felix Yusopov II (1903), Zinaida Yusopova (1902), Olga Orlova (1911) from the collection of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg and Tsar Nicholas II (1902) in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. The offered lot is more intimate and penetrating than Serov's earlier portrait from 1903, which showed Yusopov in a heroic and more traditional pose seated on one of his favourite horses, directly meeting the viewer's gaze. Here he appears in a more informal pose, depicted in three-quarter profile standing alongside rather than astride his horse, grasping his mount's reins in his right hand and casually holding a cigarette in his left. Indeed, in this second portrait the horse dominates the canvas, which must have pleased Yusopov given that in August 1903, in a letter to his wife, Serov commented that Yusopov was more interested in the portrait of his horse of which he was very proud, rather than in the depiction of himself. Given the significance of the role of the horse in military life, it is also fitting that this portrait was destined for the Household Cavalry, which was commanded by the Prince. Painted in 1909, just four years after the 1905 Revolution, this last Yusopov family portrait by Serov stands testament to the quiet before the storm. Less than ten years later the family would escape the Bolsheviks, leaving Russia for permanent exile abroad and all traces of their former glory would be swept away along with the last vestiges of the Romanov dynasty.