395 - Attributed to Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi,

Attributed to Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi, Russian 1841-1910- Sunset landscape; oil on board, bears labels inscribed 'N237' and '237 / A. Kuindzhi / Sunset' (in Cyrillic) verso, 18.9 x 27.8 cm. Provenance: Private Collection, UK. Note: This small but powerful sunset attributed to Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi is a testament to the artist's bold innovations. His style was heavily influenced by Symbolism and Romantic painting, among other movements and artists, particularly the giant of Russian painting, Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900), whilst also being highly idiosyncratic. Birch groves in shimmering light, moonlit night views, Crimean landscapes, and flaming sunsets—such as the present work—are all distinctive examples of the new artistic language coined by Kuindzhi, one that finds in its economy of means its most poignant element. The composition of the present lot is notably simple: a band of green suggests the grassland of the Russian steppes, while a larger portion of sky is painted in a bright and intense orange. The sunlight is hinted simply by an area of yellow with darker orange stratiform clouds over the flat line of the horizon. The lower left edge of the green field is accentuated by brown rocks highlighted in orange, but overall the work is thinly yet meticulously painted. Kuindzhi's 'Sunset on the Steppes on the Seashore', held at the Russian State Museum (https://rusmuseumvrm.ru/data/collections/painting/19_20/zhb-458/index.php?lang=en), offers a strikingly compelling comparison to the present lot, being almost identical in the the pictorial execution of the grass, subject, and structure of the composition. Kuindzhi was born in Mariupol—then part of the Russian Empire, and now in Occupied Ukraine—in 1841, to a poor family of Greek origins. He became an orphan at a young age, and soon started working to support his living. Nevertheless, he could attend school and was taught by a family friend. Thanks to his multicultural upbringing and background, Kuindzhi spoke Crimean Tatar, Greek, Russian, and Ukrainian. His early teenage years were marked by his work as a pigment mixer in the studio of prominent Russian marine painter Aivazovsky—a formative period that influenced him for the rest of his life, sparking a lifelong fascination with light, colour, and nature that is brilliantly on display in the present lot. He was later taught by Aivazovsky's student Adolf Fessler (1826-1885). In the 1860s, after a period working at a photography studio, Kuindzhi moved to Saint Petersburg, where he would train as a painter at the Academy of Arts, an institution at which he would become a professor and full member decades later, in 1892-3. From the 1860s onwards he took part and organised collective travelling exhibitions as part of the artist's collective known as the Peredvizhniki, and in the early 1870s he also started working independently. His career changed in 1873 when businessman, philanthropist, patron, and collector Pavel Tretyakov (1832-1898) bought one of his works. This marked the beginning of a longstanding patronage which would include multiple important acquisitions and commissions for colossal sums. Kuindzhi always taught, championed, and endorsed younger artists and Academy students, so much that he was fired from the Saint Petersburg institution in 1897 for supporting their protests. A year before his death, in 1909, he founded the Society of Artists, later called the Kuindzhi Society of Artists, with the aim of providing financial, creative, and institutional independence to young artists. The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, founded by Kuindzhi's patron Pavel Tretyakov, holds one of the most substantial and important collections of Kuindzhi's works in the world, second only to the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. The appearance of Kuindzhi's works in the market is extremely rare. Christie's, London, offered a moonlight landscape catalogued as 'Attributed to Kuindzhi', on 28 November 2007, lot 320, which was strikingly similar to the present lot in its attribution, medium and support. More recently, on 16 May 2024, Lempertz, Cologne, sold a painting fully attributed to Kuindzhi, entitled 'Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus' (lot 1123).