Lot 4: VASILY VASILIEVICH VERESCHAGIN

VASILY VASILIEVICH VERESCHAGIN 1842-1904 SHIPKA PASS inscribed by the artist in Cyrillic on label on the reverse: The offered painting shows "Our Batteries at Shipka" and the batteries of Pr[ince] Meshchersky - painted by me/ The artist V Vereshchagin oil on canvas 98.5 by 150cm, 38 3/4 by 59 in.

'Vereschagin is unquestionably the most interesting figure of the Russian art world at the present time' wrote Ivan Turgenev during Vereschagin's one-man exhibition of his Balkan and Indian series in Paris in 1879. Shipka Pass is the most impressive canvas ever to be offered at auction of Vereschagin's Balkan series, which consists of 25 paintings and 50 études inspired by his first-hand impressions of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78. Not only does the present work mark a pivotal event of Russian history, but in its restraint and minimalism it is also one of Vereschagin's most modern, bearing out the praise of a French critic, that many of his war paintings were 'radically different and in the highest degree contemporary... in form and content. No previous period of art would have dared anything similar' (quoted in Sobranie sochinenii V.V.Stasova, St. Petersburg, 1894, p.540).

As the prospect of conflict with the Ottoman empire grew closer in 1876, 'the Slavic question' was a cause that galvanised the whole of Russian society. This war was neither one of conquest or national defence, but a war to liberate Russia's oppressed Slavic brethren from Ottoman rule. To Sergei Ivanovich in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, 'it seemed that it was a cause destined to acquire vast dimensions and to create an epoch in Russian history'.

In anticipation of hostilities, moved by patriotism and, as he simply put it, filled with 'a great desire to see with my own eyes a regular European war', Vereschagin requested to join the staff of the Russian army as a volunteer in October 1876. He was assigned without salary or military uniform to the staff of General Mikhail Skobelev (1843-1882) of the Caucasian Cossack Brigade, whom he had befriended in Turkestan (fig.2). Skobelev commanded a force in the fourth and decisive battle for control of the crucial pass at Shipka in January 1878, which resulted in a crushing Ottoman defeat. Prince Emmanuel Nikolaevich Meshchersky (1832-1877) was one of the heroes of the battle.

The danger to Vereschagin was very real. Turkish rifles picked off anyone who ventured outside the earth huts on the road up to Shipka Pass. 'All day long bullets were whizzing about, literally like flies; every minute a shell would burst, now on this side, now on that. Well do I remember one day sitting down to sketch under cover of a Turkish bullet-proof block-house, and being obliged to leave my work unfinished, three shells in rapid succession having struck the roof and broken everything, covering my palette thickly with dust and dirt' (the artist's annotation to The Earth Huts at Shipka, 1888 New York exhibition catalogue).

Yet the unusual spectacles afforded by a theatre of war fascinated Vereschagin. In Shipka Pass, the smoke plumes from relentless bombardment merge into a white shroud of cloud above the ominously silent landscape. The deceptive peacefulness echoes the deeply ironic title to his famous triptych All Quiet At Shipka, and his painterly interest in the plumes recall an earlier episode when he risked his life to witness fierce bombardment from a Turkish gunboat on the Danube: 'it was most interesting to see how the bombs fell into the water and made fountains rise high into the air'. When asked why he would put himself in the front line, Vereschagin replied 'I just couldn't miss the chance to see at close range the effect of the colours, and, to tell truth, I really haven't seen anything like it in my life'.

Vereschagin was anxious that his series of Balkan paintings should not be broken up, but although Grand Duke Nicholas and the future Tsar Alexander III both expressed an interest in acquiring them, some of the canvases were deemed too controversial and the Prussian military attaché even advised the tsar to buy and destroy the entire series. In the event, Pavel Tretyakov purchased five of the most important works; Ivan Tereschenko, a Kiev sugar baron, acquired five of the other large canvases together with a number of études and the remainder of the series was dispersed across the world following an auction in New York in 1891.

As with the best of Vereschagin's war paintings, Shipka Pass shows that he was more than a mere war reporter or disciple of Horace Vernet, provoking thought on the scale of human endeavour, the role of the soldier, the beauty of nature and the strangeness of war. In the words of Jules Claretie, 'Mr Verestchagin is, in his rendering, a painter who resembles no other. He is an artist who not only makes you see, but think' (quoted in The Vereschagin Collection Catalogue, Waldorf Astoria, 1902).