Live Auction 17187Russian Art
Sergei Chekhonin (1878-1936)
Lot 30

Sergei Chekhonin (1878-1936)

Beast and egg

Closed3 June 2019

Price Realised

GBP 87,500

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Sergei Chekhonin (1878-1936)
Beast and egg
numbered 'N92' and illegibly inscribed (lower right)
pencil, ink and watercolour on paper; unframed
5 1/8 x 7 in. (13 x 17.8 cm.)
(3)together with a letter from Aleksei Remizov (1877-1957) awarding Chekhonin 'The Order of the Monkey, First Class', dated 29 January 1917: 'To our regal artist, Sergei Chekhonin, for his incomparable flowers and jewels, for his outstanding, fine brush, we award him the Order of the Monkey, First Class'

Acquired directly from Pierre Ino (1909-1989), stepson of the artist, by Alexandre Djanchieff in Paris in the late 1980s.
By descent to the present owner.

Specialist note

During the revolutionary, civil war years, the Russian modernist writer and calligrapher Aleksei Remizov, known for his fantastic and bizarre literary imagination, created the secret society ‘the Order of the Monkey’. The society was formed of members of the Russian cultural elite and gave out orders to its members as rewards for excellence in the fields of art, literature and culture. The monkey was chosen as the society’s symbol, supposedly since monkeys are known for their intelligence and cunning as well as their wilfulness and unwillingness to obey rules and norms.