Sergei Alexandrovich Shcherbatov

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Sergei Alexandrowitsch Prince Shcherbatow (also Scherbatow , Russian Сергей Александрович Щербатов ; born July 19, 1874 in Moscow , † May 23, 1962 in Rome ), was a Russian aristocrat , painter , patron and art collector .

Life

Shcherbatov, offspring of the Russian princely family Shcherbatov, son of the officer, aristocratic marshal and former Moscow mayor Alexander Andreevich Shcherbatov (1829-1902) and his wife Marija Pavlovna (1836-1892), a daughter of the Russian historian Pawel Mukhan71), was 1797-1897 the first and only son the couple had after four daughters. He grew up on the Shcherbatov family estate, which was located near the Nara River. The prince's inclination for art became apparent early on.

At the University of Moscow he took historical and philological subjects after secondary school. He also received private lessons in painting from Leonid Ossipowitsch Pasternak . In 1889 he traveled to Düsseldorf , where he enrolled to study painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . There he attended a preparatory class and the class for ornamentation and decoration led by Adolf Schill . In 1890 Hugo Crola was his teacher. In the 1890s he lived in Munich , then known as the “German Athens”, a melting pot of new artistic and cultural movements. Members of a Russian artists' colony also took part in its bohemian style . In Munich, Shcherbatov became a student of the Slovenian painter Anton Ažbe , who had opened his own studio there and in 1891 a private painting school. In this painting school Shcherbatov cultivated particularly friendly ties with the painter Igor Emmanuilowitsch Grabar . Together with Grabar and Mstislaw Valerianowitsch Dobuschinski , he visited the Paris World Exhibition in 1900 .

Pavlovna "Polina" Ivanovna Shcherbatov , painting by Vasily Ivanovich Surikov , 1910

In 1902 Shcherbatov settled in Saint Petersburg for some time , where he and Wladimir Wladimirowitsch von Meck (1877-1932) ran an art salon for jewelry, paintings and furniture until 1903, in which Shcherbatov designed his own room. In particular, paintings by Konstantin Andrejewitsch Somow and Nicholas Roerich as well as prints by Japanese masters and glass art by René Lalique were exhibited. In 1904 he married Pavlovna "Polina" Ivanovna Rozanovna (1880–1966), the daughter of a farmer on the Shcherbatow family estate and mother of the adopted daughter Valentina (1898–1985). After the death of his father, who inherited a huge fortune as a major shareholder of the Moscow merchant bank, Shcherbatov returned to Moscow and was involved in the management of the Tretyakov Gallery from 1911 to 1915 . In the years 1911 to 1913 he had the Armenian architect Alexander Tamanjan build a palatial neoclassical apartment building on Novinsky Boulevard , which was planned to accommodate larger art collections in the individual private apartments. The Shcherbatov family's art collection was in his own private apartment, which quickly established itself as an elegant meeting place for Muscovite artists and the upper class. Thanks to inherited financial resources, Shcherbatov had considerably expanded the collection to include icons, secular paintings, sculptures and other fine art objects. He donated parts of the family collection to the Tretyakov Gallery during the time of the Russian Empire , and other parts to the Rumjanzew Museum in 1918 . During the upheavals that occurred in 1917 as a result of the February and October revolutions , Shcherbatov first tried to come to terms with the Bolsheviks as an artistic adviser . The Bolsheviks had Shcherbatov's collection nationalized and part of it sold abroad. Fragments of the collection are preserved in the Pushkin Museum in Saint Petersburg and in the Bashkir State Art Museum in Ufa .

After retiring to the Crimea for a short time in 1918 , he emigrated with his family to France in 1919 , where he acquired the eclectic "Villa Talbot" in Cannes, which was surrounded by a large park and which he sold a little later for financial reasons. Then he and his family went to Paris , the center of Russian emigration after the October Revolution. Soon he was forced to drastically reduce his standard of living and go to gainful employment by writing articles for various magazines. Together with Vladimir Pawlowitsch Riabuschinski (1873–1955) and others, he founded the Society Икона (German: Ikone) in Paris in 1927 , which was dedicated to the art-historical and sacred significance of icon painting. In the 1930s he began to write his memoirs, which were published in 1955 in New York City , where he had lived for a long time, under the title Художник в ушедшей России (German: Artists in Past Russia) in Russian and only at the end of Published in Russia in the 20th century. After a stay in Florence , he settled in Rome in 1953. Since his family's financial situation was not the best, he contributed to their maintenance by accepting extras in historical films, while his wife worked as a fortune teller and produced perfumes according to old peasant recipes. As a fortune teller, she even counted the Crown Princess of Italy, Marie José of Italy, among her customers in 1941 . Occasionally Shcherbatov wrote art reviews, short stories and poems in verse when he was old. The couple's apartment on Via Antonio Musa 5A was their last residence. There the aristocrat ended his life surrounded by a multitude of works of art and nostalgic memorabilia, which he spent in seclusion with the exception of the frequent visits by Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov until 1949 . Shcherbatov's grave is in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, where he is buried next to his wife and daughter.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. No. 12404–12407 (Scherbatow, Sergei) in: Findbuch 212.01.04 Student lists of the Düsseldorf Art Academy , Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rhineland department
  2. ↑ Bettina Baumgärtel , Sabine Schroyen, Lydia Immerheiser, Sabine Teichgröb: Directory of foreign artists. Nationality, residence and studies in Düsseldorf . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 439
  3. ↑ Villa Talbot , data sheet in the portal culture.gouv.fr , accessed on February 5, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Shcherbatov, Sergei Alexandrovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shcherbatov, Prince Sergei Alexandrovich (full name); Scherbatow, Sergei Alexandrovich; Щербатов, Сергей Александрович
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian aristocrat, painter, patron and art collector
DATE OF BIRTH July 19, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH May 23, 1962
Place of death Rome