Новгородский торг. # 1 1920

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2011/russian-works-of-art-n08733/lot.23.html

RUSSIAN ART

12 APRIL 2011 | 10:00 AM EDT

NEW YORK

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, MASSACHUSETTS

Estimate 400,000 — 600,000 USD

LOT SOLD. 842,500 USD

Nicholas Roerich

1874-1947

THE NOVGOROD MARKET FROM SADKO, 1920

signed with artist's monogram (lower right); bears various labels, numbers and inscriptions (on the reverse and the stretcher)

tempera on canvas

28 by 36 in., 71 by 91.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Collection of Louis and Nettie Horch, New York (acquired directly from the artist)

Thence by descent

Private Collection, Massachusetts

EXHIBITED

New York, Kingor Galleries, The Nicholas Roerich Exhibition, December 1920-January 1921 (traveling exhibition, visiting the following locations among others)

Boston, Boston Art Club, February 1921

Buffalo, Albright Art Gallery, March 1921

Chicago, Art Institute, April-May 1921

St. Louis, City Art Museum, July 1921

San Francisco, Museum of Art, September-October 1921

Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1922

New York, Nicholas Roerich Museum (permanent collection), 1923-1935

Amherst, Massachusetts, Mead Art Museum, Theater as Spectacle: Early Twentieth-Century Russian Set and Costume Design, September-November 1994

LITERATURE

C. Brinton, The Nicholas Roerich Exhibition, New York, 1921, no. 128

F. Grant et al. Roerich, Himalaya, A Monograph, New York, 1926,

p. 198

Roerich Museum Catalogue, New York, 1930, no. 128

A.V. Yaramenko, Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich, his life and creations during the past forty years, New York, 1931, p. 36

Mead Art Museum, Theater as Spectacle: Early Twentieth-Century Russian Set and Costume Design, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1994, back cover (incorrectly titled)

E. Yakovleva, Teatralno-Dekoratsionoe Iskusstvo N. K. Rerikha, Samara, 1996, p. 230, no. 351, illustrated

CATALOGUE NOTE

In the north of Holy Russia lies the mighty and glorious town of Novgorod, known to all as Lord Novgorod the Great. And once there lived in great Novgorod a bard, a musician of some repute, named Sadko.

In 1919 Roerich traveled to London where he was commissioned to make set designs for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's medieval epic Sadko at the Royal Opera House. The Novgorod Market from Sadko, 1920, is one of a few extremely rare designs for this unrealized production; it is a prime example of Roerich's work for the opera and theater, vibrantly executed in his trademark painterly style. The composition is framed by a proscenium, and when turned vertically it reveals forms otherwise concealed in the panorama including trumpeters, a lion and a hilltop adorned with iconic onion domes. Such imagery underscores the artist's early interest in Symbolist painting, and it prefigures the forms, often spiritual, he would later embed in his landscapes.

Roerich discussed at great length the care and premeditation he put into his stage designs:

I never paint the scenery for an opera or a ballet without first having an intimate acquaintance with both the drama and the music. I study both deeply, in order to get at the spirit that lies behind both, which spirit must be one and the same if the work is to be great and lasting. Having steeped myself in the central idea, the inspiration that gave birth to the work, and permitted it to take possession of me, I then endeavour to express the same thought, the same inspiration in my painting, that the composer and the librettist have expressed in music and in words (as quoted in C. Brinton, Nicholas Roerich Exhibition, p. 21).