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Lot Essay
Konstantin Egorovich Makovsky (1839-1915) left a significant artistic legacy. He worked as a genre painter, was a master of history painting and was also a skilled landscape artist. However, portraiture was definitive in his oeuvre. The artist's son, the famous Silver Age art critic, Sergei Makovsky, considered that his father's legacy included 'very many portraits, more than all those by Kramskoi, Repin and Serov put together'. It is Makovsky's portraits of female sitters that comprise the most striking part of his oeuvre. These are generally gala portraits of society beauties, whose luxurious accoutrements vie with the graceful appearance of their heroines. At Makovsky's 1897 solo exhibition in St Petersburg, female portraits and heads significantly outnumbered the other works on view. The critics noted, 'This abundance of feminine and ladylike elements is so significant and eye-catching to such an extent that all the other pictures, their large dimensions notwithstanding, retreat into the background, while that which Goethe so felicitously called 'Ewig-Weibliche' [the eternally female] remains in the foreground'.
Makovsky frequently painted the women he was close to. He was happily married three times. Makovsky lived with his first wife, Elena Timofeevna for no more than seven years; she died at a young age from consumption in 1873. In 1875 Makovsky married Iulia Pavlovna Letkova, fêted as the most beautiful woman in St Petersburg. Several portraits of Iulia Pavlovna are known: two of which (the most famous of the group) are located in the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg; the first depicts her in a red dress (1881); the second with her children Elena and Sergei (1882). Iulia Pavlovna's 'facial type' was also employed by the artist to depict beautiful boyarinas in his history paintings of the 1880s as well as for mythological and allegorical characters in easel paintings and monumental works.
In 1889, in Paris, where Makovsky kept a studio for his use during the autumn and winter when it was cold and dark in St Petersburg, he met Maria Alekseevna Matavtina and once again fell in love. As a result, Makovsky divorced Iulia Pavlovna in 1892 and remarried in 1898. He lived with Maria Alekseevna who was his junior by thirty years until his death in 1915; she did not long survive him. They had three children before their marriage, (Konstantin, Olga and Marina), who were legitimised after they were wed. Their last son Nicholas was born in 1900.
The physical similarity between his second wife, Iulia Pavlovna and his third, Maria Alekseevna, is famous. They were both outstanding beauties with well-proportioned facial features. Iulia, however, was brown-eyed, while Maria had grey-blue eyes. It is also doubtless that Makovsky gave to almost all of the women he portrayed traits of an ideal female type which he had refined.
From the 1890s, Maria Alekseevna became the artist's constant model. Her portraits were frequently shown at exhibitions of the St Petersburg Society of Artists. She posed as Juliet in the painting Romeo and Juliet (1895, Odessa Art Museum) and her features are recognisable in the later version of Ophelia.
The present portrait of Maria Matavtina is painted in the best tradition of classical formal European portraiture, imparting the desire of a maestro to compete with the Old Masters. It is not by chance that Makovsky's contemporaries compared him to van Dyck while the art critics remarked that 'His colours sing, like those of Rubens.' Makovsky's female portraits constitute a body of superb painting, with a wonderful sense of detail and of its place in the overall composition of the work, a richness and ornamentation of colouring, a free and temperamental brushwork and an eroticism, which although not overt, was nevertheless expressed in the very presentation of the image. This portrait of the artist's third wife, Maria Matavtina, possesses all of these characteristics to the highest degree.
This portrait will be published in the forthcoming second edition of the monograph on Konstantin Makovsky by Dr Elena Nesterova to whom we are grateful for writing this note.
Makovsky frequently painted the women he was close to. He was happily married three times. Makovsky lived with his first wife, Elena Timofeevna for no more than seven years; she died at a young age from consumption in 1873. In 1875 Makovsky married Iulia Pavlovna Letkova, fêted as the most beautiful woman in St Petersburg. Several portraits of Iulia Pavlovna are known: two of which (the most famous of the group) are located in the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg; the first depicts her in a red dress (1881); the second with her children Elena and Sergei (1882). Iulia Pavlovna's 'facial type' was also employed by the artist to depict beautiful boyarinas in his history paintings of the 1880s as well as for mythological and allegorical characters in easel paintings and monumental works.
In 1889, in Paris, where Makovsky kept a studio for his use during the autumn and winter when it was cold and dark in St Petersburg, he met Maria Alekseevna Matavtina and once again fell in love. As a result, Makovsky divorced Iulia Pavlovna in 1892 and remarried in 1898. He lived with Maria Alekseevna who was his junior by thirty years until his death in 1915; she did not long survive him. They had three children before their marriage, (Konstantin, Olga and Marina), who were legitimised after they were wed. Their last son Nicholas was born in 1900.
The physical similarity between his second wife, Iulia Pavlovna and his third, Maria Alekseevna, is famous. They were both outstanding beauties with well-proportioned facial features. Iulia, however, was brown-eyed, while Maria had grey-blue eyes. It is also doubtless that Makovsky gave to almost all of the women he portrayed traits of an ideal female type which he had refined.
From the 1890s, Maria Alekseevna became the artist's constant model. Her portraits were frequently shown at exhibitions of the St Petersburg Society of Artists. She posed as Juliet in the painting Romeo and Juliet (1895, Odessa Art Museum) and her features are recognisable in the later version of Ophelia.
The present portrait of Maria Matavtina is painted in the best tradition of classical formal European portraiture, imparting the desire of a maestro to compete with the Old Masters. It is not by chance that Makovsky's contemporaries compared him to van Dyck while the art critics remarked that 'His colours sing, like those of Rubens.' Makovsky's female portraits constitute a body of superb painting, with a wonderful sense of detail and of its place in the overall composition of the work, a richness and ornamentation of colouring, a free and temperamental brushwork and an eroticism, which although not overt, was nevertheless expressed in the very presentation of the image. This portrait of the artist's third wife, Maria Matavtina, possesses all of these characteristics to the highest degree.
This portrait will be published in the forthcoming second edition of the monograph on Konstantin Makovsky by Dr Elena Nesterova to whom we are grateful for writing this note.