Lot 7: VASILY VASILIEVICH VERESCHAGIN

VASILY VASILIEVICH VERESCHAGIN 1842-1904 SUNSET IN THE HIMALAYAS inscribed with the artist's name, titled Gimalai in Cyrillic and dated 1879 on the reverse oil on canvas image size: 39 by 26.5cm, 6 1/4 by 10 1/2 in.

In the spring of 1875, halfway through their first trip to India, Vasily Vereschagin and his wife, Elizaveta Kondrateevna, began their ascent of the Djongri peak of Kanchenjunga. As a local paper reported, no tourist since the great British explorer, Dr Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), had ever attempted the climb at that time of year, "yet the brave Russian painter overcame the dreadful threat of being buried alive by the landslides and avalanches that are commonplace at this time of year" (quoted in Russkii mir, 19 February 1877, No.47). The plein-air sketches which Vereschagin painted during the three days he spent on the summit are arguably the best landscape studies that he ever produced, and include a vista similar to that in the present work, Himalayas, Evening (fig.1, 1885, The State Tretyakov Gallery).

The couple only narrowly survived their intrepid journey however, which was beleaguered by lack of supplies, freezing temperatures, and recalcitrant guides. Vereschagin described the experience to Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906) in a letter from Tamlong, where he had been invited to stay afterwards by the king of Sikkim. 'I'm staying in the heart of the Himalayas, in the small kingdom of Sikkim... I've been visiting Buddhist monasteries, but before then my wife and I nearly froze to death at 15,000 feet... After several days at that altitude my face swelled up and my head suffered from the terrible atmospheric pressure which would certainly have done for me if I'd lingered, and I was forced to descend before I'd completed all the sketches I had intended' (letter to Stasov, February 1875, quoted in A.Lebedev, Vasily Vasilievich Vereschagin, Moscow, 1972, p.144).

Yet this stunning chain of snowy peaks had entranced him, and he promised to return to study the changing shadows and strange qualities of light. 'Anyone who has not been at that climate or at that altitude cannot have any conception of the vivid blue of the sky. It is something extraordinary, quite unbelievable: deeper than the purest cobalt, almost ultramarine with a tiny hint of carmine. The white-pink snow against that dark background makes for a striking contrast" (Impressions of Mr and Mrs Vereschagin on their Journey through the Himalayas, Part 1, Sikkim, St Petersburg, 1883, p.39-40). Wary perhaps of exaggeration and keen to maintain reputation as an accurate ethnographer, Vereschagin reiterated these sentiments in his New York exhibition catalogue: "The effects of sun in India are simply astonishing - without seeing them it is difficult to have faith in the truthfulness of the artist" (artist's annotation to no.69 Kachinjinga, Pandim and other Mountains in the Clouds in Exhibition catalogue of the works of Vassili Verestchagin, New York, 1888).

The immense physical challenge of painting in these climactic conditions left him so weak that at times he had to be carried to his easel, and therefore some of his etudes are naturally modest pieces – 'mere sketches' as Vereschagin continues in his letter to Stasov, 'but many of them are finished works, and these are each, I hope, worthy of a St Petersburg professorship (not that I ever want or have wanted that mind you)... I hope they will have not only an Anglo-Indian significance, but a universal one, and not just in form only'. In her monograph on the artist, Elena Zavadskaya writes: 'his Indian drawings are precise in their contours, clean, resonant... with strict construction of space and a definite succession of planes' (Vasily Vasilievich Vereschagin, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986, p.26). The majestic view in the offered lot is remarkable precisely because of the different qualities of light on each successive plane: the sunlight on the mountain peaks offset against the dusk of the foothills, as Asoke Mukerji notes in his article 'As Russia Saw Us: the paintings of Vereschagin', which conveys simultaneously two worlds, the spiritual and the natural (The Guardian, 21 November 2010).

The Himalayan studies at The State Tretyakov Gallery are among 78 Indian études which Petr Tretyakov acquired from the artist in 1880. Like the offered lot, these have irregularly cut edges and pinholes to the corners, and have been lined on a fine canvas. It is thought that Vereschagin painted them in situ on a piece of canvas pinned to his painting-case easel and subsequently lined and stretched them for exhibition. Vereschagin was apparently very fond of his studies, and rarely sold them, preferring to store them in a trunk. The majority of works sold during his lifetime were signed and the inscription on the reverse may have been added by his second wife, Lydia, after his death in 1904.