
Daria Khristova nee Chernenko
Department Director
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Sold for £37,500 inc. premium
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Department Director
PROVENANCE
Gifted by the artist to the present owner, the grandson of the artist's cousin, Ekaterina Cavos-Hunter
For portraits by Serebriakova of David Hunter's father and grandmother, see Christie's London, Important Russian Pictures, 29 November 2006, lots 135 and 188.
This alluring portrait, redolent with softness and colour, illustrates Serebriakova's affinity with youth and its charms. She drew David Hunter's father and grandmother years before and in so doing was affirming the bonds between the cousins, all of whom are descended from leading lights of the Russian intelligentsia.
An Italian ancestor, Catterino Cavos (1775-1840), moved to St. Petersburg from Venice in 1798 to direct the Bolshoi Kamenny, and is celebrated for composing Ivan Susanin, regarded as the first Russian opera. His son, Alberto Cattrino Cavos (1801-1863), gained renown as an architect of theatres, designing the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow after its destruction in 1853. Cavos was granted the 'architect's box' at the Bolshoi and this passed to his Benois descendants.
Alberto's daughter, Camille Cavos, married an apprentice of her father, the architect Nikolai Benois (1813-1898), whose family fled the French Revolution in the 1790s and moved to St. Petersburg. One of their children was Alexandre Benois, who, within the field of Russian art needs no introduction. As Alexandre Benois's niece and the child of artistic parents, Serebriakova was born into a family where her talents for painting and drawing were fostered.