Lot 175: Petr Fedorovich Sokolov, 1787-1848 , a pair of portraits of Count Alexander and Countess Natalia Stroganov both watercolour on paper

both signed in Latin both watercolour on paper Quantity: 2

image size: 22 by 16.5cm., 8¾ by 6½in.; 22.75 by 17.25cm., 9 by 6¾in.

Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Exposition d'Art Russe Ancien et Moderne , May - June 1928
Paris, Salle Pleyel, 'Exposition Pouchkine organisée par Serge Lifar', 1937

Count Stroganov portrait illustrated in I.S.Zil'berstein, Parizhkie nakhodki: epokha Pushkina, Moscow: Izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo, 1993, p. 67

A.A. and V.E. Popov, Paris
Sotheby's London, Icons, Russian Pictures and Works of Art, 7 April 1980, Lot 127

Petr Sokolov was made Academician for his exquisite watercolour portraits, of which the offered pair is a particularly fine example. A veteran of the later battles of the Patriotic War and the Russo-Polish War, Count Stroganov was Interior Minister twice under Nicholas I, and Governor General of several important southern Russian provinces, as well as Military Governor of St. Petersburg for a year in 1854. In 1849 he was elected to the State Council, a great honour and an influential position. Aside from affairs of State, he still found time for his great passion: Russian history and antiquity, and was always generous in his museum bequests. Natalia Kochubei is thought to have been one of Alexander Pushkin's first muses, though his advances were unrequited, and her marriage to Count Stroganov in 1818 is thought to have inspired some of Pushkin's more lovelorn poetic passages.