Viewpoint

Description

Viewpoint – a card for every day featuring art by by Konstantin Somov showing a room with small bottles, flowers, books on a table, with a view through an open window over a field with trees and a house in the distance.

Konstantin Somov was born in 1869 in Saint Petersburg, Russia to an educated family. His father was a curator at the Hermitage Museum and his mother was a musician from a family in the Russian nobility. As a young man he studied at the Imperial Academy and one of his earlier well regarded paintings was Lady in Blue, a portrait of the artist Yelizaveta Martynova. It is a daring painting with the sitter with bare shoulders and her left hand pointing to the V in her blouse. Compared to Titian or Rembrandt or Van Dyke the painting is somewhat lacking, but the person that is Yelizaveta Martynova shows through and the painting is successful for that.
Somov was a founding member of the ‘World Of Art’ movement and was initially excited with the prospect of sweeping change in the Revolution of 1917. But with the Bolshevik rise in 1922 and after visiting the United States he decided to quit Russia. He lived out his life as an exile in Paris with his long term muse, companion, and sitter Methodius Lukyanov.

Somov painted a very broad range of subjects, from portraits to landscapes and in a wide range of styles, suggesting he was looking for his own original essence through which to express himself. His painting in this card is especially successful in its glowing richness and framed view from beloved objects inside, looking out towards pleasantness outside.

SKU: C0418