Our Notes & References

A finely bound copy of this impressive, luxurious publication of ‘the Russian Berlin’, limited to 300 copies (this one #47); the handsome, Payne-style full-morocco binding is signed by Morrell of London.

It worth noting that the collation of other copies is sometimes confusing: ours is complete with 36 plates, whereas almost all others traced at auction or in libraries are listed as having 33-35.

“This Russian artist is possessed of an unusual vivacity of line and power of analysis and sympathetic statement, which render his portraits very notable among present-day works.” (from a contemporary review in The Studio)

Sorin’s Portraits includes three dozen window-mounted lithographs of various sizes, the majority in full colour, along with a foreword by French poet, art critic and specialist of the émigré Russian artists André Salmon.

The volume opens with an aquarelle of the Duchess of York, capturing the cheery demeanour for which she would become famous as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The next image, in contrast, thrills us with the delicate yet angular dynamism of prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, captured at that moment when “elle va cesser d’être femme; cesser d’être une femme qui danse pour être la danse même” (Salmon, paraphrasing Mallarmé).

Other sitters in this collection include exiled Russian and Georgian aristocrats such as Princess Olga Orlova, one of the most important figures in pre-revolutionary Petersburg society, and Princesse Melita Cholokashvili, who modelled for Coco Chanel. There are wealthy businessmen and their families (e.g., Pierre S. du Pont of DuPont and General Motors); artists, singers, and other cultural figures (e.g., the philosopher Lev Shestov); and, interspersed with the celebrities, a few anonymous faces (an ebullient Russian peasant, an embittered demimondaine).

The original paintings were executed in a variety of media: watercolour, gouache, pencil, chalk, pastels, etc. Many currently hang in major galleries such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the location of over a dozen of the original portraits is still unknown.

Savely Sorine (1878-1953) studied in Odesa and at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, at the studio of Ilya Repin. Over the first decade of the 20^th century he won fame as a society portraitist, painting luminaries of Russian art and culture such as Akhmatova and Chaliapin. Sorin also illustrated the works of well-known writers such as Maksim Gorkii. He emigrated to Paris in 1920.

Like other modern masters such as Matisse and Picasso, Sorine was influenced by the expressive distortions of Ingres. Yet the art critic Christian Brinton did not count him among the modernists, seeing in him “a reversion to that sovereign integrity of line and form, and that regard for rhythm and compositional balance which reigned undisturbed before the advent of latter-day artistic radicalism.”

With associated provenance. This luxuriously bound copy belonged to Virginia Fortune Ogilvy (1933-2024), Countess of Airlie and Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth II. She was the daughter of Margaret Kahn, and granddaughter of Adelaide Kahn and Otto Hermann Kahn, the German-American financier and philanthropist. The latter three all have portraits featured in the present volume.

Provenance

Acquired from the estate of Virginia Fortune Ryan Ogilvy, Dowager Countess of Airlie.

Bibliography

Brinton, C. “Savely Sorin.” Exhibition of portraits by Savely Sorin. Galleries of M. Knoedler & Company, February 19 to March 5, 1923; “Notes,” The Studio, vol. 92, no. 403 (15 Oct., 1926), p. 286; Sorin, V. and I. Menshova. “Savelii Abramovich Sorin. Katalog portretov,” (online).