Sotheby's to host highly fascinating Russian sale

Sotheby's has one of the most fascinating Russian sales of the recent years scheduled for May 21st, says Martin Saunders-Rawlings, prime consultant of the Russian sales.

According to his account, the auction features an unprecedentedly large number of "extremely valuable canvases" by Russian painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Art critics, who talked to RIA Novosti on Sunday, said the upcoming auction is notable not just because it features, for the first time in its history, a number of paintings from the collection owned by the family of the great Russian singer Fyodor Shalyapin. Other works appearing on sale are of no lesser value and will be duly appreciated by museums and private collectors.

The paintings in question include Konstantin Korovin's "Lady in an Apple Orchard," a canvas experts describe as an unparalleled manifestation of artistic skills. Known as the Father of Russian Impressionism, Korovin was a close friend of Shalyapin's and often painted the great singer and his daughters. Other works featured were authored by Ivan Aivazovsky, Natalia Goncharova, Robert Falk, Solomon Nikritin, Boris Grogoryev, Mikhail Andreyenko, Alisa Pore and many other acknowledged Russian artists.

Collectors will undoubtedly be attracted by Robert Falk's "Portrait of a Hindu Boy," a work that spent many years in the keeping of the painter's widow, who bequeathed the major part of her husband's pictures to Israeli museums /"Falk's major works, all of them deeply psychological, don't often appear on sale," the experts said/, Solomon Nikritin's "Classic Figures," and Alisa Pore's "The Apple and the Glass" /paintings by Pore, one of the best disciples of Petrov-Vodkin, rarely surface at auctions/.

There's also "The Bather" by the Ukrainian artist Mikhail Andreyenko, whose artistic style presents a successful combination of Russian avant-garde and French art. The pictures painted by this avant-garde artist, who is known to have been in close contact with avant-garde classics Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, are scattered among foreign collections and rarely appear on sale.

The auction at Sotheby's sales area in New Bond Street is expected to gather a record high number of Russian dealers.