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Lot Essay
The young model’s features are carefully captured here with Harlamoff’s characteristic handling. The Russian artist living in Paris rendered this sitter numerous times with slight variation in the expression, details of her clothing and the flowers, a testament to his scrupulous nature. Despite his careful attention to these details throughout the various versions, Harlamoff’s treatments nonetheless retain a balanced ease and natural presence.
Harlamoff, a graduate from St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts, moved to Paris and came to study under Léon Bonnat, exhibiting frequently at the Salon. Harlamoff, like Bonnat, frequently depicted young sitters, but confined himself to this subject matter even more strictly than his teacher and similarly Harlamoff’s work is replete with a sentimentality which contemporaries perceived as a manifestation of his Russian roots tinged with Frenchness. While elements of Harlamoff’s style draw from traditional training and display a type of combination of romanticism and realism, his style remains difficult to define. His sitters reflect a type of anonymity that generates a universality in their portrayal, a trait that grew out of Harlamoff’s primary concern for the aesthetic composition over any underlying political message. His undefinable style that expressed beauty and innocence is as confounding as the complexity and rather contradictory narrative of Russian art in the second half of the 19th century.
We are grateful to Eckart Lingenauber and Olga Sugrobova-Roth for confirming the authenticity of this work on the basis of a photograph.
Harlamoff, a graduate from St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts, moved to Paris and came to study under Léon Bonnat, exhibiting frequently at the Salon. Harlamoff, like Bonnat, frequently depicted young sitters, but confined himself to this subject matter even more strictly than his teacher and similarly Harlamoff’s work is replete with a sentimentality which contemporaries perceived as a manifestation of his Russian roots tinged with Frenchness. While elements of Harlamoff’s style draw from traditional training and display a type of combination of romanticism and realism, his style remains difficult to define. His sitters reflect a type of anonymity that generates a universality in their portrayal, a trait that grew out of Harlamoff’s primary concern for the aesthetic composition over any underlying political message. His undefinable style that expressed beauty and innocence is as confounding as the complexity and rather contradictory narrative of Russian art in the second half of the 19th century.
We are grateful to Eckart Lingenauber and Olga Sugrobova-Roth for confirming the authenticity of this work on the basis of a photograph.