Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, Scotland (the same private collection as Young Girl Blowing Bubbles, sold in these rooms in 2008 for £568,800)

We are grateful to Dr O. Sugrobova-Roth and Dr. E. Lingenauber for confirming the authenticity of the offered lot following examination of a photograph.

Purchased by the great-grandparents of the present owners, the offered lot has belonged to the same private Scottish collection for over 100 years. Harlamoff enjoyed considerable success in Scotland after first exhibiting his work at the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, and it is highly probable that he returned there in some capacity to build upon this initial entrée. The family of the present owners were so impressed with Harlamoff's paintings that they bought three of his works at the turn of the century, of which the present lot is one.

'Straightforward in subject, superlative in execution, and true to beauty... All is simple, there is no mendacious elegance'. So wrote Emile Zola in praise of Harlamoff's exhibits in the 1876 Salon in Paris and the same could be said of the offered lot which shows three delicate and attentive girls admiring the pictures in a book. Famed for his ability to capture the beauty and innocence of his mostly youthful sitters, The Storybook is executed with Harlamoff's characteristic handling: simplicity of composition and idealized subject matter.

The girl in pink on the left is sweetly solemn, while the older girl smiles, perhaps knowing the joy of the story they are reading, and the younger child on the right looks earnestly at the picture. As Zola noted, the elegance of Harlamoff's paintings derives from a clear allegiance to balanced compositions and traditional techniques. The source of light in the painting appears to come from the book as though a metaphor for the enlightening effect of knowledge, however one suspects that the artist is being a little more playful and suggesting, perhaps, that the children are bathing in the joy of a good story.

Harlamoff may well have seen William-Adolphe Bouguereau's The Story Book, painted in 1877 (collection of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art) and been inspired by the subject matter, namely the appealing nature of an innocent child holding a book, a key to knowledge and hence wisdom. Bouguereau's painting would seem to address the contradictory concepts of innocence and knowledge more directly than Harlamoff's similar composition. The young girl he depicts appears to be both naïve and poised at the same time, as though on the threshold of the loss of innocence. In the offered lot, Harlamoff is possibly acknowledging all aspects of the acquisition of knowledge with the young girl on the left looking pensive and the other two sitters appearing to be more joyful.

Coming to the market for the first time since its acquisition in the early 20th century, the offered lot is a superlative example of Harlamoff's sympathetically rendered and technically brilliant paintings.