A View of Nizhny Novgorod

A View of Nizhny Novgorod is an oil painting on board by the Russian landscape painter Konstantin Gorbatov, signed in Cyrillic and dated 1921 at lower left; it measures 31.5 by 41 cm and was offered at auction by Bonhams.

Gorbatov was born in 1876 in Stavropol, in Samara province, and came to painting by a roundabout route: he studied civil engineering in Riga, attended the Stieglitz school in St Petersburg and entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in its architecture department before switching to landscape under Nikolay Dubovskoy and Alexander Kiselyov. After graduating in 1911 he spent 1912 to 1913 in Italy, where Maxim Gorky admired his work on Capri, and in 1917 he joined the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers. In the years around the revolution he travelled widely in Russia, painting old towns such as Pskov, Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl and Vologda, as well as views of the Volga.

This small panel belongs to that period. Pink-and-white river steamers with flags lie moored on the right, barges and a sail crowd the left bank, and across the bright water a hillside town glows with autumn colour beneath towering clouds. The broken, vivid brushwork shows the colour and attention to light and air that writers have linked to Russian Impressionism and to his Italian stay.

It was painted a year before Gorbatov left Soviet Russia in 1922; he settled in Berlin, where he died in 1945. According to Bonhams, the painting was given by a Russian patient to a Spanish doctor and passed by descent in a Spanish private collection, and it is to be included by Olga Sugrobova Roth in the database for the catalogue raisonné of Gorbatov's work in preparation. In 2022 the Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum held the first solo exhibition of his work in the city.