Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich

(1874-1947)

'Ancient church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin' at city of Vladimir

Footnotes

Provenance
International Exposition, St. Louis, USA, 1904
Sold at public auction by the USA Treasury in 1912
Acquired from the above by Mr. Frank C. Havens, Piedmont, CA, 1912
Acquired by Russian-American artist Gleb Ilyin (1889-1968), student of Nikolai Fechin at the Kazan Art School and of Ilya Repin at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts; from 1924 an active member of the Russian artistic diaspora in the USA, San Francisco, circa 1935
Thence by descent

Exhibited
Probably St. Petersburg, Imperial Society for Encouragement of the Arts, Sketches of Russian Antiquities, 1903
St. Louis, The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis World's Fair), 1904

Literature
Official Catalogue of Exhibits, Department of Art, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, no. 443, p. 289, listed under the full title: 'City of Vladimir/ Ancient Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin, ornamented with figures of animals and build on the spot where formerly stood the palace of Duke Andrew Bogoliubsky'
Sergei Ernst, N.K.Rerikh, Petrograd, 1918, pages 113-114, listed as 'Vladimir: "Church of Intersession on Nerli", as part of 75 studies completed by Roerich during travel across Russia in 1903.

In 1904, six hundred Russian paintings were shipped across the Atlantic to represent Russian art at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World's Fair) in St. Louis and then seemed to disappear. Shown to the American public to great acclaim at the World's Fair, these paintings soon became the subject of laws suits, conflicting and fraudulent claims, and even a US President's intervention. Most of them travelled to Canada and back, and eventually most of them were auctioned off by a weary US Treasury Department as 'unclaimed merchandise', as the story is so brilliantly described by Professor Robert C. Williams in his fascinating book Russian Art and American Money, published in 1980.
When the Treasury Department was unable to unravel the mystery of ownership of this collection of works, it was decided to arrange a public auction in San Francisco in 1912. Most of the paintings, including the present lot, were purchased by Mr. Frank Havens, a Californian businessman and real estate developer from Oakland. The auction became a sensation when Mr. Havens purchased all of the paintings (500 works) for $39,000. Some works were kept in his private collection, some sold through the art gallery that he established, and a number of them were auctioned off in October 1916 in Oakland.

In St. Louis Exposition Nikolai Roerich exhibited seventy two fully completed studies showing Russian Architectural Antiquities painted during his expeditions across Russia in 1903 undertaken at the invitation of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of Art. The present work listed in Official Catalogue of St. Louis Exposition under number 443 and fully titled as 'Ancient Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin, ornamented with figures of animals and built on the spot where formerly stood the palace of Duke Andrew Bogoliubsky', has a fully preserved paper label on reverse; the inscribed number 45 and title in Russian 'Pokrov' (Intersession of the Mother of God) most likely refers to the listing and number assigned to it by the artist prior to the shipping of the work to the USA.
The present work was acquired in California in late 1930s by a prominent Russian-American artist Gleb Ilyin and remained in the family of the owners ever since. It is a very rare work from the early period of Roerich' oeuvre which illustrates the level of technical accomplishment achieved by the artist and his dedication to the preservation of important architectural monuments of ancient Russia. The original exhibition label on the verso of the work reveals the painting's complex, unusual and fascinating history.

We would like to thank Mr. Gvido Trepša, Executive Director of Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York for his kind assistance with research of the present lot.