Boris Grigoriev (1886-1939)

Self-portraits appear in Grigoriev’s oeuvre from an early stage. As early as 1907 the artist drew a number of self-portraits. As Tamara Galeeva mentions in her monograph (Boris Grigoriev, St Petersburg, 2007, p. 83), the well-known 1914 pencil self-portrait, drawn in Brittany, displays the openness and disturbing tensions of the author. Possibly, that is how Grigoriev’s contemporaries conceived of the artist. The present portrait was painted in 1931 and appears to relate to a photograph (fig. 1) taken almost a decade earlier. In 1931 Grigoriev had already permanently settled in Cagnes-sur-Mer and opened a school of drawing and painting in his own studio. Perhaps the artist missed his time in Paris, the city where he achieved international recognition and created a visual reference of himself in memory.