(Kiev 1858–1911 St. Petersburg)
The Lake, signed in Cyrillic script, dated (18)92, oil on canvas, 51 x 81 cm, framed, (Rei)

On the stretcher a label (partly torn off) from the exhibition of 18th to early 20th century Russian painters from the Leningrad private collections at the premises of the UdSSR art academy in 1955.

Provenance:
Viennese private collection, acquired by the father of the present owner in the 1970s.

We are grateful to for Dr. Olga Sugrobova-Roth her assistance in cataloguing this work.

Konstantin Kryzhitsky was a part of the generation of landscape painters of the Russian and Ukrainian school of painting who received a particularly high standard of training at the St. Petersburg Academy. A pupil of the outstanding landscape painter Mikhail Klodt, in 1908 Kryzhitsky was appointed chairman of the A. Kouinji society. His landscapes, often monumental in character, were characterised by the perfection of the composition and colouring. Tsar Alexander III acquired at least one of his works. Kryzhitsky was popular with St. Petersburg’s aristocracy. In his memoirs, Other Shores, the great Russian author Vladimir Nabokov records a landscape of Kryzhitsky’s, hanging in his parent’s house in St. Petersburg. The present lot The Lake is one of those works in which Kryzhitsky’s striving to depict the boundlessness of nature is realised in a particularly forceful manner. It is a version of his 1896 composition The Lake held by the Reserve Museum in Vladimir and is, without doubt, one of the artist’s best works.