Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist.
Alexandra Fechin.
Lorena V. Montgomery.
Lonilee von Hassecn; Berenice M. Strathearn.
With Fenn Galleries Ltd., Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1978.

Exhibited
Minnesota, The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA), Discovering 20th Century Russian Masters: Nicolai Fechin, August 2012 – January, 2013.

The work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Fenn Galleries Ltd., Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Nikolai Fechin is a renowned master of children's portraits. In his oeuvre, a special place belongs to the paintings of his daughter Eya. She was his favourite model from the moment of her birth in 1914 until her twentieth birthday, appearing in both paintings and numerous sketches. Fechin's portraits consisted of a combination of anatomically accurate and refined faces, as well as free, spontaneous brush strokes. He mixed depth with flatness; contrasted textures and vivid blocks of colour; used a complex, dynamic colour scheme; and incorporated dynamism into his compositions, despite the static poses. This can be seen even in works of a smaller scale, such as the opresent work. Although Fechin's paintings to an extent possessed an impressionistic quality of incompleteness, they do not look unfinished. A comparison with the sketches of Eya created by Nikolai Fechin in the first year and a half after his arrival in New York in the second half of 1923 - 1924 reveals the closeness of the stylistic techniques of this sketch to portraits such as Eya, a study for the portrait Eya with a melon, 1923, Stark Museum of Art, Texas, and Portrait of Eya probably second half of 1923, Private collection, New Mexico.

Reproductions of the present work are stored in the archives of the artist's heirs, the archive of the heirs of Forrest Fenn, and the archive of G.P. Gallery.

We are grateful to Galina Tuluzakova for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.