1927
oil on canvas
67 x 52 cm (26 1/2 x 20 1/2 in.)
signed and dated upper left



LOT NOTES
Ivan Kirillovich Parkhomenko (1870-1940) was a Soviet portraitist, known for his St. Petersburg gallery that comprised of over 90 Russian realist portraits of various Soviet writers, including those of Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Bunin, Alexander Blok, Demyan Bedny, among many others. In 1908, when he returned to St. Petersburg from studying in Paris, he founded several other portrait galleries, which he dedicated to painting Russian authors, such as Aleksey Remizov, and political figures, including Vladimir Lenin, Sergei Witte, and others. Dubbed the Kremlin Painter, Parkhomenko created realistic, raw portraits, often reflecting his personal opinion of the sitter, which ultimately led to his arrest in 1928. During his two-year sentence, Parkhomenko painted portraits of criminals that recognized his fame and demanded to sit for him. In 1930, he was offered a position in Ukraine as a portraitist of the elite. This was his final artistic period before falling ill and moving back to Moscow in the late 1930s. The present lot is a 1927 portrait of Aleksey Tchapygin, a Russian writer known as one of the founders of the Soviet historical novel.