LOT DETAILS

Materials:

oil on canvas

Measurements:

14.17 in. (36.00 cm.) (height) by 31.50 in. (80.00 cm.) (width)

Markings:

Signed

Provenance:

Purchased by Maria Dirina and her husband the Swedish businessman Gösta Hellman (the grandparents of the present owners) in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. The Dirins were landowners who lived near Kharkov. Shortly after the revolution Maria Dirina met and fell in love with the Swedish Businessman Gösta Hellman. Her younger sister Olga, however, was suffering from tuberculosis, so Hellman married her and brought her to Stockholm for treatment. He then immediately divorced her, and returned to Russia to marry the woman he loved, Maria. He was working for SKF (a large Swedish company with business interests in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kharkov), and together the couple formed this collection of paintings, bringing them first to Helsinki and then finally to Stockholm when they settled there after the end of the Second World War., Petrovichev was one of the foremost landscape painters of the first half of the 20 th century. He took on and then developed the 19 th century tradition of his teacher Levitan, and developed a highly individual impressionistic, fractured style, using large brushstrokes and brighlty coloured paint to depict views of ancient Russian cities, many of them around the Volga where he grew up