In this room you see a nice trajectory of Leonid's work from the years in Russia to the years in Germany.
To your right and behind you as you come in, you will see a beautiful pastel portrait of his two daughters [1], Lydia and Josephine – my mother in pink (Lydia), and Josephine looking beautiful in green, both bearing flowers for the parents' silver wedding, in Russia.
On the opposite wall you can see an oil painting, which is again, of the two daughters [2] – Josephine [seated] recognisable, Lydia [standing] not so much because her face is in shadow. [And here are the two sisters, late in life, by their portrait.] [3]
This painting is particularly interesting because it has an enigmatic date on it: ‘16.22’ [4][Detail] [This cannot signify a month and year, nor a day in a month, because there are only twelve months in every year, neither 16 nor 22. It can only signify the year in which it was originally painted (1916), followed by the year of the copy (1922).
It was only when the Swedish owner of the original painting contacted us that we realised our version was a later copy that Leonid must have made, shortly after his arrival in Germany, in order to sell the original. In this copy, that he kept for himself, he visibly modified the faces] to fit the more mature Lydia and Josephine. This painting is known, and always has been known in our family as 'the Gauguin'.
Gauguin of course is the French impressionist painter [5] who spent some of his life in Tahiti painting the women there. As soon as you look at Leonid’s portrait with the word ‘Gauguin’ in your head, you can see that especially the figure in the background is very much like a Gauguin figure – Lydia with her dark hair [and shaded face]. The nice shawl that Josephine is wearing also gives the picture that kind of exoticism. And Leonid’s uncharacteristically flat use of the oils is very much in Gauguin’s style.
[Gauguin in Russia: Gauguin worked in Tahiti from 1891-3 and 1895 till his death in 1903. His work was first bought in 1901 by Mikhail Morozov, the Muscovite texture manufacturer and trail-blazing impressionist art-collector. He was later followed by his brother Ivan, and Sergei Shchukin, the greatest Muscovite collector of French impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. From 1909 Shchukin opened his palatial Moscow home to the public on Sundays, where his Gauguin Tahitian paintings were strikingly displayed, all 16 canvases as a single-wall tableau in the dining room. Leonid would have been able to see and admire them there.]
