Savva morozov biography of william
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Reuniting an Art Collection Once Swept Away by History
The elder Morozov brother, who moved with his new wife into a 19th-century palace in Moscow, clearly enjoyed his fortune. “Mikhaïl lived in a very grand bourgeois style,” the curator points out. “He was a real bon vivant—he drank too much and ate too much. He had his house done by a trendy architect, which he filled with his paintings and objects. It was particularly in his private office, where he received artists, that he had his French paintings.”
By the time he died, in 1903, of the kidney condition nephritis, at the age of 33, Mikhaïl had amassed 44 works by Russian artists and many important French Impressionist paintings—Manet, Renoir, Degas, Monet—along with Postimpressionist works by Gauguin and van Gogh, and sculptures bygd Rodin. “Collections and collectors are still so rare in Russia,” wrote Sergueï Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, in a tribute. “We can only imagine how serious the collection of Mikhaïl
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Morozov: The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection 0300249829, 9780300249828
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Morozov
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MOROZOV The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection
NATALYA SEMENOVA Translated by Arch Tait
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON iii
Copyright © 2020 Yale University and Natalya Semenova All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except bygd reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected] yalebooks.co.uk Set in Adobe Garamond Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain bygd Gomer Press Ltd, Llandysul, Ceredigion, Wales Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941220 ISBN 978-0-300-24982-8 A catalogue record fo
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Chapter Two: Youth
In the summer of 1893 I again went to sea, but this time on board the Training Ship Prince Pojarsky[9]. She was an ancient three-master ironclad, steam and sail, of ante-diluvian design. Owing to her size and tonnage, she carried a veritable forest of yards and rigging, into which, except up the mainmast, we were forbidden to go because it was considered definitely dangerous.
However, in spite of this cumbersome world aloft, we cruised a good deal in her under sail, but only in the Gulf of Finland.
There was the same seemingly entirely indispensable and continuous flow of abuse, and the commander of the Moriakhad thoroughly worthy rivals in our captain and commander when it came to venting their tempers on the crew. They, too, were addicted to crew beating.
There was something new on the Pojarsky, which we had not experienced on the Moriak, and it was a truly interesting experience, something that had to be seen to be believed; this was her horizon