Leopold Bernhard Bernstamm (Latvian, 1859-1910). Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich of Russia (1857-1905), circa 1893. Bronz...

Description

Leopold Bernhard Bernstamm (Latvian, 1859-1910)
Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich of Russia (1857-1905), circa 1893
Bronze
11 inches (27.9 cm)

PROVENANCE:
The Forbes Collection, New York;
Christie's New York, Russian Works of Art, Important Silver and Objects of Vertu, May 20, 2015, lot 87;
Private California Collection, acquired from the above;
Private Collection, Los Angeles, acquired from the above.


Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich of Russia (1857-1905) was a son of Emperor Alexander II and the uncle of Tsar Nicholas II. A rigidly conservative and deeply religious figure, Serge Alexandrovich served as Governor-General of Moscow from 1891 to 1905. His tenure was marked by his enforcement of reactionary laws and his austere moral authority, which earned him admiration from conservatives and intense hostility from the majority of Muscovites who found him oppressive. His assassination in 1905 by a revolutionary, Ivan Kalyayev, was one of the most shocking acts of political violence in late-imperial Russia.

The sculptor Leopold Bernstamm (1859-1939), a Latvian-born artist of the Russian Empire, was renowned for his finely modeled bronze portrait busts of prominent figures from Russian and European society. He sculpted several members of the house of Romanov, including Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich.

Bernstamm created at least two portrait busts of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich before 1900. Another bust of the same model with drapery, of approximately the same size and dated 1893 survives in the collection of The State Historical Museum, Moscow (inv. ГИМ 81999/1). A second larger model, without drapery and in military uniform from the 1890's is also in the State Historical Museum, Moscow (inv. ГИМ 94602). The composition of the offered lot closely echoes Bernstamm's better-known 1895-1897 busts of Nicholas II, sharing the same half-length draped form and refined surface modeling, typical of the sculptor's mature imperial style.

It may have been decided that the draped models too closely evoked that of the emperor and the more modest military model was executed for wider distribution.




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