Lot 55: f - Klavdi Vasilievich Lebedev, 1852-1916 , The dyak Zotov instructing the tsarevich Petr Alexeevich in his letters

signed in Cyrillic l.l. and dated 1903 oil on canvas

98 by 122.5cm., 38½ by 48¼in.

St. Louis World's Fair, Louisianna Purchase Exhibition , 1904

The reverse with the label of the World's Fair, St. Louis, 1904, Louisianna Purchase Exhibition Company, Counsellor of Commerce E.M.Grunwaldt. The Louisianna Purchase Exhibition was held in 1904 to celebrate a century of American progress. Vyacheslav von Plehve, Russian Minister for the Interior, agreed to participate and shipped the works of over 200 leading painters to America along with a lavish wooden pavillion in which to house them. Finance minister E.M.Grunwaldt had drawn up contracts with the artists confirming they would receive 70% of the purchase price of any works sold. However, since the 600 pictures had been imported for exhibition and not sale, when Grunwaldt tried to auction them in 1906 after the exhibition, they were impounded by the US Treasury and kept as 'unclaimed merchandise'. A Californian Businessman, Frank Havens, arranged to have the whole collection removed to Canada, where they were kept in a warehouse, before re-entering the United States 6 years later. US President Howard Taft agreed to sell the entire collection at a sensational public auction in 1912, where Havens bought most of the works for a total of $39,000. He sold the majority of his Russian pictures at one notable sale in Oakland in 1916, from where they passed into the hands of private collectors and museums in California.