Lot 23: MIKHAIL ALEXANDROVICH VRUBEL

MIKHAIL ALEXANDROVICH VRUBEL 1856-1910 THE ASSYRIAN glazed ceramic height: 20.8cm., 8 1/4 in.

A gift from the artist to Elena Luksch-Makovskaya
Thence by descent

The Assyrian is one of the earliest versions of a composition glazed and fired by Mikhail Vrubel in the ceramics workshop at Abramtsevo. The workshop was founded in the autumn of 1890 by Savva Mamontov, who was keen to revive the strong tradition of Russian ceramics and restored the ruined kilns on his estate near Moscow.

From the outset Vrubel was the de facto master of the ceramics workshop, assisted by Petr Vaulin, a talented young chemist, who provided technical expertise. The complex play of surfaces, volume and colour of majolica presented Vrubel with a rich source of decorative possibilities, and soon both the main house on Mamontov's estate and his house in Moscow were decorated with Vrubel's ceramic tiles, fireplaces, sculptures and vases. Mamontov moved the worshop to the district of Butyrka in Moscow in 1896 where it flourished; at the World Fair of 1900 it won international recognition and both Mamontov and Vrubel were awarded gold medals.

Versions of The Assyrian are held in a number of museum collections, including The State Tretyakov Gallery, The State Museum of Ceramics and the 18th century Kuskovo Estate, and the Krasnodar Art Museum. Although the colour of the glaze, shape and size of each model varies slightly, the sculptures clearly form a single group in terms of conception and composition. It is an extraordinarily powerful and expressive work – the intensity of the eyes lend the figure an aura of terrible grandeur and simultaneous suffering. Its conception is linked with Vrubel's stage work for Saul, a play performed at Abramtsevo in 1890, and his illustrations of Lermontov's Hebrew Melodies (1890-1891), in which Saul is depicted with a identical ringlets, hooked nose and dramatically low brows. The ancient Egyptian elements of The Assyrian are shared by other ceramic works from the early 1890s, such as The Head of an Egyptian Young Girl wearing a Wreath and The Mask of a Libyan Lion, (fig.1, The Collection of The Ambramtsevo Museum). In his memoirs, the art historian Nikolai Prakhov compared the 'monumental' lion mask to an Assyrian, no doubt impressed by Vrubel's Assyrian sculpture and the play staged at Mamontov's house where Prakhov was living at the time (N.Prakhov, Pages from the Past, Memoirs of artists, Kiev, 1958, p.147).

Vrubel returned to the Assyrian theme in the late 1890s, most likely inspired by Chaliapin's performance in Judith at Mamontov's private opera house in 1898. The coloured glazes lend a different, more theatrical air to this later series which is held at The State Tretyakov Gallery. The traditional oxidised firing and casting techniques used to make the present work are characteristic of the very earliest works Vrubel made at Abramtsevo and allow us to date it to 1890-1891.

We are grateful to Eleonora Paston of the State Tretyakov Gallery for providing this catalogue note.