Viewpoint

£2.40

– Blank inside for your own message – Printed in the UK on premium card stock – Supplied with a white envelope

Out of stock

SKU: C0418
Category:

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.

Somov was born in 1869 in Saint Petersburg, Russia to an educated and wealthy family. His father was the senior curator at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, which was then the capital of Russia. So the young Somov saw art all around him at home, and from a young age he wanted to be an artist.

Somov’s mother was a musician from a family in the Russian nobility. Money and parents with artistic leanings meant that the young Somov could pursue whatever career he felt drawn to. He wanted to be an artist and he had talent, so he studied at the Imperial Academy of Art. One of his paintings was Lady in Blue, a portrait of the artist Yelizaveta Martynova. She is sitting rwith bare shoulders and her left hand pointing to the V in her blouse. In the background, the vague figure of a man.

The painting is not as fine and delicate as a Titian, Rembrandt or Van Dyke. It is heavier handed, more modern, with the darker tones blocking up parts of the painting such as the sitter’s hair. But the person that is Yelizaveta Martynova shows through and the painting is successful for that. She has a straightforward gaze, is vulnerable and not haughty, and is a woman who puts every foot forward carefully.

Somov was a founding member of the ‘World Of Art’ movement and was excited with the prospect of sweeping change in the Revolution of 1917. Bearing in mind that the initial events of the Russian Revolution happened right there in St Petersburg, on his doorstep so to speak, it is not surprising that he was excited by the prospect of the wind of change coming to sweep through the country.

On the other hand, he had a life of privilege and he was homosexual, so negotiating the new world order was tricky. With the takeover by the Bolsheviks in 1922 he changed his view on the attraction of the coming world in Russia. After visiting the United States he decided to quit Russia and lived as an exile in Paris with his long term muse, companion, and sitter Methodius Lukyanov.

From a young age Somov painted a very broad range of subjects, from portraits to landscapes and in a wide range of styles. He was skillful but that was a burden to him looking for his own viewpoint. His painting in this greeting card that we named Viewpoint that you can see here frames beloved objects inside, and looks out to pleasantness outside. Somov painted it late in his life, in 1934.

SKU: C0418