Lot 11: VLADIMIR DONATOVICH ORLOVSKY

VLADIMIR DONATOVICH ORLOVSKY 1842-1914 STEPPE signed in Cyrillic l.l. oil on canvas 95 by 183cm., 37 1/2 by 72in.

"The sun-baked hills, brownish-green and lilac in the distance, with their quiet shadowy tones, the plain with the misty distance and, arched above them, the sky, which seems terribly deep and transparent in the steppes, where there are no woods or high hills, seemed now endless..."

Anton Chekhov's hymn to the Ukrainian countryside in The Steppe (1888) originated from a common urge shared by Russian writers and artists alike in the late nineteenth century to describe the majesty of the landscape. Like Chekhov, Orlovsky's skill as an artist lay in his profound engagement with the landscape of his youth: in a single canvas he captures both the wealth and the emptiness of the immense expanse, telling us as much about its coarseness as well as its more poetic qualities (fig.1).

Typically his paintings depict land under cultivation; the domesticity of the cattle in the offered painting recalls Arkhip Kuindzhi's famous Midday in the Steppe (1890-5, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg) yet Orlovsky's Steppe offers no sense of comfort that nature's forces have been harnessed. As with his paintings Sowing and Ukrainian Landscape with Windmill (both State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), the manmade structures appear feeble, the telegraph poles "very small thin sticks like pencils stuck into the ground" (Chekhov, The Steppe); the solitary figure is scarcely visible and even the railway barely impacts the vista, creating the impression that even the latest technological advances cannot conquer the immense expanse. Nature itself offers the only respite from the otherwise unbroken line of the horizon in the form of two trees. The viewer's reaction is that of Chekhov's young protagonist: "Who needed all that space?".

Orlovsky was born to a noble Kievan family and trained at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg under Alexei Bogoliubov, where he was awarded a gold medal. View on the Outskirts of Vilnius (The Radischev State Art Museum, Saratov) is a smaller depiction by Orlovsky of the same view.