Oksana was enchanted by her visit, and Liam, who had initially been taken by her charms, now turned his attention to Camille, who had at first seemed distant, but had now started to seduce him with her elegance and style. They drove back to Sommières where on arrival Yevgeniya Pishchalnikova cornered Oksana who excused herself, leaving Liam alone with Camille.
Camille, who had been fascinated by the arrival of this young Irishman at her grandfather’s, opened up once Oksana had left, suggesting they eat together. There were no secrets for her in Sommières and she chose a quiet corner on the terrace of a small restaurant overlooking the Gard and the Roman bridge, from where they could watch the Sunday evening strollers toing and froing under the ancient plane trees that lined the river bank.
He had come to Sommières at my beckoning, before leaving for Hong Kong, where I figured Pat Kennedy would be pleased to have the latest news on his investment.
Many aspects of France were still a mystery to Liam, and French was not his strong point, though he was learning fast. He had been briefly introduced to Camille, who seemed attractive but aloof, a bit too French to his eyes, and hadn’t really had the opportunity to speak with her other than the usual polite exchanges.
The ice was broke when Liam discovered her intertest in China, a subject for which they found themselves on common ground. Liam had travelled to China on several occasions for the bank and had developed an interest in the country and the language. The discovery that Camille’s family had a long interest in the Far East excited him, and that with her business studies and knowledge of Chinese, Liam quickly forgot his disappointment after Oksana had been whisked away by her matronly boss.
Monday afternoon Liam was leaving for Paris, where the same evening he was flying to Hong Kong. He played his cards right by offering Camilla a ride in the firm’s jet, she jumped at the opportunity.
The next morning there was a meeting to update progress with Pierre Ros. There was much work still to do and the Russians would have their work cut out with the research programme that extended to the paintings’ history and provenance, that is to say how they fit in with their respective artist’s production. For the moment they’d turned up little evidence referring to the works and dates in the catalogues raisonné, which listening Ekaterina’s last briefing could run into thousands of works, as in the case of Monet, who had two thousand five hundred works attributed to him, which was nothing compared to Picasso, who was exceptionally prolific, with nearly two thousand paintings, over one thousand sculptures, three thousand ceramics ceramics, some twelve thousand drawings, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs.
Monet and Picasso both lived to great ages, eighty six and ninety two respectively, which went a long way to producing a large volume of work, in contrast Gauguin died at the age of fifty five, van Gogh at forty seven, and Modigliani at thirty six, the latter two never succeeded in earning a living from their work.
Of course not all works have an equal value, that depends on size, period and technique. A large oil by Henri Matisse has a greater value that a small Gauguin estampe, or a small Picasso sketch. Rarity and age offers another dimension in value, the Mona Lisa or Salvator Mundi are both small and almost priceless.
Chapter 40
A Tragic Tale
How a van Gogh arrived at Sommières could perhaps provide a possible clue to the origin of the collection. Of the three that we attributed to the painter was a brightly coloured landscape, almost certainly a summer scene in Provence. The painter, Ekaterina told me, had lived for a time in nearby Arles and with a museum in that town it seemed like a path worth following up.
I never ceased to be amazed by my Katya’s deep knowledge of art and its history, but it was logical, after all she had studied the subject for years at top Russian institutions, which like other branches of the arts in Russia were renowned for their quality, where rigour was the password, after that her work at the Pushkin and Christie’s in Moscow had done the rest.
We decided a visit to the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in the centre of Arles could perhaps enlighten us, it was not far, about an hour’s drive from Sommières, and they were surely the most knowledgeable concerning the painter’s sojourn in Provence.
Champ de blé avec gerbes
The foundation was not that large, but very modern, opened in 2014. Katya introduced herself to the curator, saying we were on a short vacation. We were politely received, with mild interest, though when Katya spoke of her work with Shchukin’s collection at the Pushkin, they opened up and we were given a tour of the foundation and the current exhibition Soleil Chaud, Soleil Tardif. Les Modernes Indomptés, with works on show including seven of van Gogh’s works amongst which were Champ de blé avec gerbes, and seven of Picasso’s including Tête d’homme au chapeau de paille.
The museum in fact curated artists who inspired or had been inspired by van Gogh and had disappointingly few original of his paintings, apart from the seven for the exhibition. It was interesting, nothing more, considering the treasure we had at Sommières, however, I did get a close look at some of van Gogh’s works, especially the Champ de blé avec gerbes, which our landscape at Sommières definitely reassembled.
Our visit did teach me more about the painter’s tragic life.
Van Gogh was thirty five when he arrived in Arles in 1888, where he lived for more than a year, believing outdoor work for an artist was possible almost all the year round in Provence.
Why he chose Arles is uncertain, but he had written to his brother of his ‘plan to go to the south for a while, as soon as I can, where there’s even more colour and even more sun’.
He was tired of Paris and had set his mind on the south after having heard many stories of the light and colours in the Midi, and so following in the footsteps of many artists before him, he set off for Provence.
Arles had been a provincial capital of ancient Rome, and many vestiges of that time remained including its amphitheatre. It was just a few kilometres from Avignon and Nîmes, two cities renowned for their sights, and the proximity of what are now two natural parks, both known for their beauty, to the north the Parc des Alpilles and to the south the Carmargue.
He arrived in Arles at the beginning of May, where he rented four rooms at the Yellow House, situated on Place Lamartine, which he immortalised in several paintings, one he entitled, The Bedroom, painted in three versions. It was there his friend Paul Gauguin came to visit him in late October of the same year.
The time spent in Arles became one of his more prolific periods, when he completed two hundred paintings, and more than one hundred drawings and watercolours, including, Sunflowers, Café Terrace at Night and The Starry Night, iconic works known even to the least arty general public, which attracted ticket paying crowds to exhibitions around the globe.
Vincent van Gogh embodied the image of the tortured artist made famous by novelists and cineastes, known for having sliced off his own ear with a cut-throat razor in one of his manic depressive moods in Arles, echoed in a sombre self-portrait, complete with bandage, painted in 1889.
The son of a pastor, he was born in 1853, in Zundert in the Netherlands. In 1869, he took his first job, in the Hague at a branch of Goupil & Cie, a French art firm, a job that took him to London and Paris, but his relationship with work was complicated and he was left in 1876. He briefly became a teacher in England, and then, deeply interested in theology, prepared for the University of Amsterdam theology entrance examination, but failed, and then became a missionary to a coal mining community in southern Belgium.
In 1880, at twenty seven, after deciding to become an artist, he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, at which point his life became extremely difficult as he tried to search his way forward.
In 1886, he left for Paris to join his brother Theo, an art dealer with Goupil & Cie, who introduced Vincent to Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat. His style was transformed under the influence of Impressionism and became lighter and brighter.
His openness about self-doubt and his work was revealing as can be seen from a letter:
You don’t know how paralysing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerises some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs onto that, in short, breaks, ‘violates’, they say.
In Paris, and more especially in Montmartre, he discovered a new world of art. Influenced by Japanese prints, Impressionism and painters such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, Russell and Gauguin, he became convinced colour was the key to everything.
In 1888, two hundred paintings later, he left Paris and headed south to Arles, which he described as a foreign country, ‘The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésienne going to her First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world.’
He dreamt of founding an artists colony in Province, where he could live and work with other artists, in the Yellow House. In the end, only Paul Gauguin joined him, persuaded by Vincent’s brother, Theo, who paid his travelling expenses.
There he painted his famous series Sunflowers, one of which decorated the room where Gauguin stayed for nine weeks. They soon began to quarrel, then one night things turned violent when van Gogh threatened his friend with a knife, Gauguin
immediately left.
Letter from Dr. Felix Rey
Van Gogh, in a moment of remorse, sliced off part of his own ear with his cut-throat razor.
It was early on the morning of the Christmas Eve when he was brought to Hôtel-Dieu-Saint-Espirit, the local hospital for urgent care. That night Dr. Félix Rey, a young intern, was on duty. Van Gogh was suffering not only from the loss of blood, but also hallucinations.
The legend was he cut off part of his ear in a moment of insanity and left it with a girl at a local brothel.
What is nearer the truth is revealed in a letter from van Gogh’s doctor, Felix Rey, who wrote the painter did not just cut off a section of his ear, but severed it entirely.
Dr Felix Rey by van Gogh
The girl was not a prostitute but a certain Gabrielle who had been savaged by a rabid dog the previous year, and to pay her medical bills, took a job as a cleaner in a local brothel. It is said she knew van Gogh, given the fact that Arles was a small town.
The severed ear was given to the doctor by a policeman and kept in a jar of alcohol in Rey’s office until it was stolen.
True or not, van Gogh immortalised Dr Felix Rey by painting his portrait in January 1889, which is now hanging in the Pushkin in Moscow.
The portrait was van Gogh’s way of thanking the doctor, who later admitted he never liked it and his mother used it to patch a hole in her chicken-coop. It was sold in 1901 to the artist Charles Camoin, a friend of Henri Matisse, who following van Gogh’s footsteps found the portrait in Doctor Rey’s backyard.
Deeply disturbed van Gogh entered, of his own free will, the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the birthplace of the medieval seer Nostradamus, where he spent his time painting his fellow inmates, and others in his Sunflowers series.
By the end of his sojourn in Provence he had produced more than five hundred works, three hundred paintings and two hundred drawings.
He then returned north, where in a moment of despair, feeling he would never be cured of the madness that afflicted him, he shot himself in a wheat field, outside Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris. He did not die immediately, but staggered back to the Auberge Ravoux, clutching his stomach, where he announced he had tried to kill himself with a revolver.
His friend Dr Paul Gachet was called, but there was little he could do for van Gogh. The next day a telegram was sent to Theo who arrived that same afternoon.
Wheatfield with Crows
Theo van Gogh wrote, ‘He himself wanted to die. When I sat at his bedside and said we would try to get him better and we hoped that he would then be spared this kind of despair, he said, La tristesse durera toujours. I understood what he wanted to say with those words.’
Theo himself died six months later aged thirty three.
In what was assumed to be his last painting, Wheatfield with Crows, swarms of black birds swooped menacingly over the golden wheat, an allegory to his torment.
He wrote to his brother Theo, ‘I have painted three more large canvases. They are vast stretches of corn under troubled skies, and I did not have to go out of my way very much in order to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness.’
Tragically, Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard, to a friend’s sister in 1888.
The National Gallery in London paid one thousand three hundred pounds for Sunflowers in 1924. Today it sells countless van Gogh souvenirs and memorabilia in its gift shop and is said to have made an estimated two million pounds from the sale of postcards of that painting alone.
Vincent van Gogh’s catalogue raisonné counts more than two thousand two hundred drawings and paintings.
We left the foundation little wiser. It was a pity since unknown to them one of the most sensational art discoveries ever made in France had happened just a few miles from the museum, and we of course said nothing to arouse any suspicions as to the true reason for our visit.
The story of van Gogh only went to confirm how complicated it was to reconstitute the facts, even when his story was well documented and from so many apparently reliable sources.
In any case as far as the Fondation Vincent van Gogh was concerned, once we’d authenticated the painting we could return to consult their archives, though I doubted they could contribute much.
In the meantime we enjoyed lunch at a terrace café on place du Forum, not far from the amphitheatre, then with the aid of a map from the tourist office we set off on the van Gogh walking tour, like the couple of happy tourists we were, visiting the places where he’d set up his easel, each one of which was marked with panels representing his paintings.
We started at the place du Forum for the Terrasse du café le soir, then the Trinquetaille bridge where he painted the Le pont de Trinquetaille, the embankment of the Rhone for his Nuit étoilée sur le Rhône, the place Lamartine where La Maison jaune was located, then rue Mireille and all the other places linked to van Gogh’s sojourn in Arles. We tried to imagine Arles in 1888, it wasn’t too difficult, much of it is as it was, though it was quieter then, less connected to the outside world.
Chapter 41
The Revolution
Following the abdication of the Czar, in March 1917, and the arrival of Lenin and the Bolsheviks a month later, the Provisional Government was incapable of preventing the country’s slide into disorder and lawlessness.
Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador in Petrograd, saw anarchy spreading through all of Russia. The British ambassador, George Buchanan, said Russia was not ready for a purely democratic form of government and predicted a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions
Electricity was cut, crime rose, food became scarce and prices went wild.
According to an eyewitness account by John Reed, an American journalist, ‘The daily allowance of bread successively fell from a pound and a half to a pound, then three quarters, half, and a quarter-pound. Toward the end there was a week without any bread at all. Sugar one was entitled to at the rate of two pounds a month – if one could get it at all, which was seldom. A bar of chocolate or a pound of tasteless candy cost anywhere from seven to ten roubles – at least a dollar. There was milk for about half the babies in the city; most hotels and private houses never saw it for months. In the fruit season apples and pears sold for a little less than a rouble apiece on the street-corner
For milk and bread and sugar and tobacco one had to stand in queue long hours in the chill rain. Coming home from an all-night meeting I have seen the kvost (tail) [queue] beginning to form before dawn, mostly women, some with babies in their arms.’
The nobility and the merchant classes could do little to prevent the growing disorder that continued to spread as Shchukin and Morizov looked on with fear.
In May, Kerensky asked, ‘Is it really possible that Free Russia is only a country of mutinous slaves?’ as he struggled to reinforce the resolve of the Russian forces on the Eastern Front. ‘Our army under the monarchy accomplished heroic deeds. Will it be a flock of sheep under the republic?’
But Russia’s soldiers had no wish to die, they had only one desire, to return home, to join the Revolution, overturn the land owning classes and cast off the yoke of oppression. ‘When the land belongs to the peasants, and the factories to the workers, and the power to the Soviets, then we’ll know we have something to fight for, and we’ll fight for it!’ they told John Reed.
To understand rich men like Shchukin and Morizov we have to recall how Russian society looked at the end of the 19th century.
Czarist Russia was governed by a rigid hierarchical system, dominated by the aristocracy, the rules of which were determined by religious and social values, laws governing land ownership, and the position and status of each and every individual, with little or no mobility between the different social classes.
Under Russian Imperial law, the entire population was divided into four classes, the nobility, the clergy, urban residents and rural residents.
The Russian masses suffered under an oppressive feudal pyramidal system in which the upper classes were underpinned by the labour of the working masses, kept down by restrictive labour laws, repressive traditions, a religion that perpetuated the system by preaching obedience, and with the ever present threat of violence to those who refused to knuckle under.
The upper classes of Czarist Russia were composed of the aristocracy, nobility and the higher ranks of the clergy, which all together represented twelve and a half percent of the population.
The educated middle classes were composed of smaller entrepreneurs, merchants, functionaries, doctors and lawyers, representing a mere one and a half percent, whilst the working classes, mostly of factory workers, represented just four percent, a fraction of the population when compared to workers in England or France.
Morozov came from a family of former serfs who had paid for their own emancipation, while the Shchukins were Moscow shopkeepers. Both families had made their fortunes in textiles, the former as owners of the Tver Manufacturing Company, and the latter with their business Ivan Shchukin & Sons, Moscow’s, a leading textile wholesaler.
The Shchukin family was witness to the transformation of Russia’s old conservative, pious, poorly educated and reserved merchant class. Sergei’s father Ivan, who made his fortune in textile manufacturing, had ten children, and was interested neither by books nor paintings, he did however love Italian opera and sent his eldest sons to study business abroad. His mother on the other hand came from a family of prosperous tea merchants, and grew up in a milieu composed of Moscow’s upper classes and artistic intelligentsia.
Sergei, like his siblings, was taught French by his mother. After studying at a commercial academy in Germany and the early death of his father he took over the family business.
The Russian nobility was very broadly spread, drawing it’s members from many different ethnic groupings. There were nobilities of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Courland, Livonia, Estonia, Georgia, Crim-Tartary and Astrakhan that converged together into the nobility of the Russian Empire, with Caucasian and Georgian princes, Baltic-German feudal noblemen, Russian and Polish Boyars, and even descendants from Tartar royal houses and Tartar Khans. It was a unique mixture of divers cultural and racial backgrounds.
The aristocratic ruling elite of Russia led by the Czar was a tight circle, composed of a very, very, small number of princes, counts and barons, who considered the lesser nobility to be the backbone of Russian society. These lesser nobles, including the Boyars – that is untitled noblemen, were composed of a privileged class of rich landowners and high ranking army officers, who represented just one and a half percent of the population, or approximately two million persons, who mostly ran the nation’s administration and bureaucracy.
The nobility was the most important class in terms of wealth and social leadership.
In general they derived their wealth from the hereditary ownership of land. The Czar held the title to as much as ten per cent of arable land in Western Russia. The Russian Orthodox church and its higher clergy also owned large tracts of land.
Russia’s landed classes jealously guarded their wealth and privileges, and were the most conservative force in the empire, systematically resisting all reform.
The peasantry, who represented eighty two percent of the population, worked the land. Many former serfs worked for the landed classes, or leased land from them, using farming methods often unchanged since the Middle Ages.
The majority of the Russian peasantry were illiterate and ignorant of the world outside, suspicious of strangers, superstitious and deeply religious, many believing in magic and witchcraft, detesting the bureaucracy and its tax collectors, and feared the army that stole their sons.
Peasant uprising were not unknown, during the 1905 Revolution for example, their wrath was directed at the landowners, then in 1917 and 1918, they were whipped into fury against the nobility and landowners by political agitators and agent provocateurs.
Regardless of class or status, Russian society was deeply patriarchal, a male dominated society, their rights codified by law, with little or no rights for women.
News of the abdication, the Provisional Government, and the demands of the Bolsheviks, was slow to arrive in the towns and villages in the distant corners of Russia’s vast Empire. When it did arrive, life, at first went on as before, then slowly, as the magnitude of the changes sunk in, the peasants began to take power into their own hands.
Soon reports were arriving in Petrograd and Moscow of violence and revenge as order collapsed and the provinces tumbled into a state of anarchy and chaos. Landlords were savagely assassinated, houses were plundered and burnt, mobs of peasants and soldiers embarked on drunken rampages, torching the homes and property of nobles.
Reed told of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers deserting the front – and drifting in vast, aimless tides over the face of the land.
Alcohol was distributed by agents provocateurs to the rabble rousers, inciting them to even greater destruction. The streets were ruled by lawless mobs, armed with guns, swords and whatever weapons they could lay their hands on, burning, looting, beating their former landowners and masters forcing them to flee for their lives, those who resisted were murdered, their homes ransacked, their loyal servants lynched.
As spring turned to summer peasants in those isolated regions as yet untouched by the revolt, started to heed the voices of roaming agitators who promised the land would soon be theirs.
At the end of November John Reed reported the wine cellars of the Winter Palace were broken into and pillaged. Drunken soldiers wandered the streets of Petrograd. Battles erupted between soldiers and the Red Guard.
‘Finally the Military Revolutionary Committee sent out companies of sailors with machine-guns, who fired mercilessly upon the rioters, killing many, and by executive order the wine-cellars were invaded by Committees with hatchets, who smashed the bottles – or blew them up with dynamite.’
Amongst those caught up in the chaos were wealthy nobles like Boris and Lili Vyazemsky, who left Petrograd for the safety of their estate of Lotarevo, in the Usman District of Tambov Province, six hundred kilometres to the south of Moscow.
That spring, Boris’s brother, Dmitry, who was been killed by a stray bullet in Petrograd, had been buried in the crypt on