Piotr Fedorovitch SOKOLOV (1791-1848) Portrait... Lot 33

Piotr Fedorovitch SOKOLOV (1791-1848) Portrait of Pauline Viardot, 1843 Pencil and watercolor on paper, signed lower right, annotated "Mme Viardot" and dated 1843 lower left. 19.1 x 15.2 cm (on view), framed. Frame: 38 x 31 cm Pauline Viardot, born July 18, 1821, and died in Paris May 18, 1910, at the age of 89, was a legendary 19th-century French composer and opera singer, and a muse of the Romantic era. She was admired by such great musicians as Frédéric Chopin, Frantz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz, Charles Gounod and Camille Saint-Saëns. She was the sister of an equally famous singer, Maria Malibran (1808-1836). In 1843, Pauline Viardot sang in St. Petersburg, and it was on this occasion that Piotr Sokolov painted this portrait. While there, Viardot met the great Russian writer Ivan Tourgueniev (1818-1883), who fell head over heels in love with her, to the point of spending a large part of his life with her and her husband. Our portrait is reproduced in the monograph on Turgenev by N.Bogoslavski. Provenance: descendants of Pauline Viardot