The opera singer Felia Litvinne

Portrait of the Opera Singer Felia Litvinne is an oil on canvas by the Russian painter Alexei Harlamoff (Alexei Harlamov, 1840–1925), signed 'Harlamoff' at lower left and undated; it was last offered at Sotheby's London in 2017.

Harlamoff, born into a family of serfs near Saratov, trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg and moved to Paris on an Academy scholarship in 1869, where he came under the guidance of Léon Bonnat. He became a regular in the circle of the singer Pauline Viardot and the writer Ivan Turgenev, and his portraits of Pauline and Louis Viardot at the Salon of 1875 drew the attention of the Paris press. Into this circle came the young soprano Félia Litvinne, who arrived from Saint Petersburg in 1876 to take lessons with Pauline Viardot.

Litvinne (1860–1936), born Françoise-Jeanne Schütz to a Russian father and a French-Canadian mother, became a dramatic soprano known above all for Wagner roles. After her Paris debut in 1883 she sang at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Covent Garden and La Monnaie, created roles in three operas by Saint-Saëns and later taught singers such as Germaine Lubin and Nina Koshetz. The connection with Harlamoff endured: in 1922 she showed his work in her Paris salon, and when he died in 1925 she was his sole heir. He painted her several times; another, larger portrait dated 1924 has also passed through Christie's.

This bust-length canvas, 55 by 45.5 cm, shows the sitter turned slightly to the left, her auburn hair piled high, wearing a loose pink-and-cream lace blouse and long strands of pearls against a dark brown ground. It is listed and illustrated in the 2007 Harlamoff catalogue raisonné by O. Sugrobova-Roth and Eckart Lingenauber (no. 233a). It was sold at Christie's London in 1993, Christie's New York in 2000 and Bonhams London in 2005 before the Sotheby's sale, where it was estimated at £20,000–30,000.