Alexei Harlamoff (Russian, 1840–1925)
A Young Beauty
Oil on Canvas, 17 3/4 x 14 1/2 in.
Signed lower left: A. Harlamoff.
1997.23
Alexei Harlamoff is best known for his numerous images of young women, which were sought by collectors in England, France, and the United States. Though born in Russia and trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Harlamoff lived most of his life in Paris (where he briefly trained with the renowned painter and teacher Léon Bonnat in 1872). He received favorable critical reception in France — most notably from the writer and critic Émile Zola, who praised him in his Salon reviews of 1875 and 1876 — but was attacked by many Russian critics for his light subject matter. He was seen as abandoning the ideals of his homeland by not addressing social material, as voiced by the Russian critic Vladimir Stasov, “For all I care this French Harlamoff can live in Paris and captivate the French with his allure; here he is entirely unsuitable, here one needs something quite different.” Because of the perception that he was “too Western,” Harlamoff was largely ignored by Russian art history during the Soviet era.
A Young Beauty is an example of the numerous images of beautiful girls and young women that dominate Harlamoff’s oeuvre (though he did also create large portraits and genre scenes). These idealized images mostly consist of bust- or three-quarter-length views of attractive, solitary young girls, set within an indeterminate space. However, these pictures were not created to reflect individual likenesses, but were idealized representations of youthful female beauty — and part of a larger late-19th-century trend in which artists increasingly created images of attractive young girls for the purpose of contemplating feminine beauty alone.