Savely Abramovich Sorin, Peasant Woman from the Province of Smolensk, 1903
Signed in Cyrillic and dated at upper left
Oil on canvas
57 x 44 in. (144.8 x 111.8 cm) (as framed)
Inv. no. ab_7823
This work belongs to the earliest years of the career of Savely Sorin (1878–1953). Sorin does not have the typical biography of a professional artist in the late nineteenth century, nor of the society portraitist he became in the twentieth. He was born Savii or Zavel Izrailevich Sorin to the family of a poor Jewish tailor in Polotsk (now Polatsk, Belarus). Sorin showed artistic promise at a young age, but it was a career his father opposed on religious grounds. This conflict led to his departure from home at the age of 16. He spent a little over a year traveling with significant periods spent in Orel, Tula, and Smolensk. This painting is undoubtedly based on his observations during his time in the latter city.
His innate skill and self-education gained him admission in 1895 to the Odesa Art School (now the Grekov Art College) in 1895, a prestigious institution whose alumni includes Wassily Kandinsky, Natan Altman, Boris Anisfeld, Leonid Pasternak, and Yakiv Chernikhov. There Sorin studied under the Realist artist and member of the Peredvizhniki Kyriak Kostandi (1852–1921). Sorin graduated in 1899 with a gold medal, which allowed him to enroll at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg without sitting for entrance exams. He remained at the Academy until 1907, studying in the classes of Ivan Tvorozhnikov (1848–1919), Ilya Repin (1844–1937), and Vasily Savinsky (1859 – 1937). Tvorozhnikov, like Kostandi, was a practitioner of critical realism and often focused on the poor and members of the peasantry in contemporary society. Sorin’s unromanticized view of a somewhat disheveled young woman in the interior of a peasant cabin in Smolensk was probably painted under the guidance of Tvorozhnikov or Kostandi. Ultimately it was Savinsky and Repin, both gifted portrait painters, who shaped Sorin’s later, better-known career.
Sorin certainly took great pride in this painting. In 1904, while he was still a student at the Academy of Arts, the opportunity arose to have this work and one other exhibited in the Russian Section of the Palace of Fine Arts at The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, informally known as the St. Louis World's Fair, held in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904. The exhibition included some 600 works by two hundred artists, all of whom were promised 70% of the purchase price of any work sold. Unfortunately, the exposition commissioner, Finance Ministry employee Edward Grunwaldt (1856–1915), imported the works for exhibition rather than sale. When Grunwaldt attempted to sell the works at an auction in 1906, the paintings were seized for non-payment of import duties. They were ultimately sold to San Francisco businessman Frank C. Havens (1848–1918), who displayed them in his Piedmont Art Gallery. This painting was once again sold in 1916 in the Sutter Street Salesrooms together with Flemish, English, Spanish and German works. From that moment, it disappeared from public view. Its re-emergence offers an important clue in the study of the Russian phase of Sorin’s career.
Provenance:
Collection of the artist
Frank C. Havens, Oakland, CA
By whom sold in in San Francisco, CA in 1916
Private collection, USA
Exhibitions:
Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, Missouri, 1904
Piedmont Gallery, Piedmont, California, 1912–1916
Literature:
World's Fair, Saint Louis, U.S.A., 1904: Louisana [sic] Purchase Exposition, Russia, Fine Arts, publisher unknown, p. 26, no. 259.
Auction of Frank C. Havens' World Famed Collection of Valuable Paintings, October 1916, Sutter Street Salesrooms, San Francisco, California (per Williams).
Robert C. Williams, “America’s Lost Russian Paintings: Frank C. Havens and the Russian Collection of the 1904 St. Louis Exposition,” Soviet Union/Union Soviétique 7: 1-2 (1980), pp. 19, 21.
Robert C. Williams, Russian Art and American Money (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1980, pp. 58, 78.