This June, Christie’s will sell some exquisite works of art in London. The star of the event will be an Ilya Repin canvas painting that has been in a private collection since 1916. This is the last privately-owned Repin painting and it hasn’t been seen on the market for almost a century. The current owner’s grandfather – the man who first bought the piece – was personally acquainted with the Russian painter.
“A Parisian Café” is arguably the artist’s most important work and quite atypical for a Russian painter of his time. Repin created it during the time he was a student in Paris, between 1873 and 1876. The work was exhibited in the French capital in April-May 1875 with the name “Un café du boulevard” and it caused quite an argument between Repin and his main mentors, Ivan Kramskoi and Vladimir Stasov.
On June 6, 2011 the painting is expected to fetch between £3 million and £5 million ($4,845,000-$8,075,000). After this important lot, Christie’s will also sell the artist’s Parisian sketchbook containing more than 120 drawings, of which over 70 are preparatory works and studies for “A Parisian Café”. After this lot is sold for between £150,000-£250,000 (approx. $242,000-$404,000), Christie’s will also sell four more lots of preparatory works for the painting.
Other Russian painters to be represented at the forthcoming sale are Boris Grigoriev, Petr Nilus, Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky, Alexandre Benois and Ivan Shishkin. Also, for the first time at auction, twelve post-war Russian works from the Dionysios Kostakis will be offered at Christie’s sale.
