Young girl with a basket of apples

Born to a family of serfs, the 19th century painter Aleksei Harlamoff would go on to enthral crowds of art lovers in Russia, France and beyond, rising mercurially above his humble origins. Aged just fourteen, the young Harlamoff left his home in the Saratov province to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Harlamoff excelled at the Academy, winning numerous awards and receiving a scholarship upon graduation to study in Paris. In Paris, Harlamoff studied under the French master Léon Bonnat (1833-1922), a leading proponent of Western realism, and became acquainted with the eminent writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) and other Russian artists, writers and musicians living in Paris. Turgenev wrote of Harlamoff and compared him to his rival and peer Repin: ‘Two incredible artists have appeared here – Repin and Harlamoff. The second, especially, will go far’ (I. Turgenev, Letter 3320, 1874). Harlamoff’s most eminent clients would go on to include not only Turgenev, but also Pavel Tretyakov (1832-1898) and Tsarina Maria Feodorovna (1847-1928), among others. Around this time Harlamoff’s career took off: he began to exhibit frequently in Paris, while sending canvasses to Russia to take part in the exhibitions of the Itinerants, a group of Russian realist artists whose work sought to celebrate folk life as well as criticising inequalities in Russian society. Indeed, Harlamoff specialised in painting young peasant girls, shedding light over their impoverished circumstances while celebrating their vitality and innocence, and often used the same models, who appear to grow older from one painting to the next.
In the present lot, the delicate brushwork and gentle rendering of light make for a poignant evocation of a child’s innocence, characteristic of Harlamoff’s canvasses, made evident by the young girl’s oblivion to her penurious surroundings, which recall the artist’s own impoverished childhood. The vibrant colours of the apples contrast with the sombre and earthy tones of the background, while the artist uses thin layers of paint to create rosy flesh tones in the child’s face. Indeed, Young girl with a basket of apples makes for an exquisite and quintessential work of Harlamoff, a sublime synthesis of his masterful artistic qualities. The young girl in the present lot is most probably a younger version of the Kiev type, as classified in Olga Sugrabova and Eckart Lingenauber’s catalogue raisonné (O. Sugrobova-Roth & E. Lingenauber, Alexei Harlamoff. Catalogue raisonné 1840-1925, Düsseldorf, 2007).