CUANDO LA VIDA AÚN NO PESA

Christa Zaat

Nikolay Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky (Russian painter) 1868 - 1945
На послеполуденной рыбалке (Mid-day Fishing), 1917
oil on canvas 
130 x 102 cm. (51.18 x 40.16 in.)
signed in Cyrillic and dated '1917' (lower left); stretcher with various paper labels and inscribed numbers
private collection

Catalogue Note Bonhams sale
Nikolai Bogdanov-Bel'sky's œuvre can be said to be primarily preoccupied with the theme of childhood. The artist painted the life of young peasant children in different forms throughout his artistic life, from his early works, which exhibit a strong interest in the sociological conditions of rural childhood (At the doors of the school, 1897, Russian Museum) to his plein air works which depict both the joyful and everyday pursuits of youth. The present lot is a very fine example of Bogdanov-Bel'sky's delight in, and affinity for, the young.

I have always had children alongside me, I have devoted, and indeed still devote my life to them.
Nikolai Bogdanov-Bel'sky

* * *

Nikolay Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky (Никола́й Петро́вич Богда́нов-Бе́льский) was born in the village of Shitiki in Smolensk Governorate in 1868. He studied art at the Semyon Rachinsky fine art school, icon-painting at the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra in 1883, modern painting at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1884 to 1889, and at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1894 to 1895. He worked and studied in private studios in Paris in the late 1890s.
Bogdanov-Belsky was active in St. Petersburg. After 1921, he worked exclusively in Riga, Latvia. He became a member of several prominent societies in including the Peredvizhniki from 1895, and the Arkhip Kuindzhi Society from 1909 (of which he was a founding member and chairman from 1913 to 1918).
Bogdanov-Belsky painted mostly genre paintings, especially of the education of peasant children, portraits, and impressionistic landscapes studies. He became pedagogue and academician in 1903. He was an active Member of the Academy of Arts in 1914. Since 1921, he lived in Riga.[1] Bogdanov-Belsky died in 1945 in Berlin.
He was a member of the Russian Fraternitas Arctica in Riga.