Lot 358

Overall in good condition with areas of verdigris and wear consistent with age and use


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Mark Matveevich Antokolsky was one of the most important Russian realists of the nineteenth century with The Tretyakov Gallery alone housing thirty of his works, including the bust of Mephistopheles as well as editions of the full-body version in marble and bronze. The sculptor first had the idea of portraying the demon made famous by Goethe's Faust in 1874, and whilst living in Paris, he produced the bust in 1877 and finished the full-body sculpture in 1883. The same year it was purchased by the Hermitage, and in 1897 it was moved to the newly-established Russian Museum in St Petersburg. It represents the devil's agent as a slender man lost in thought, forgoing any costume to underscore his subject's timelessness and universality with only the goatee and slightly horned haircut to signal the demon's devilish nature. His elbows and shoulders are sharp, his fingers long, his facial features lean, his skin taut over bone. His posture is hunched and its tension is internal, as if the demon were gathering his thoughts and energies without any signs of danger or aggression.

On the day he completed the sculpture Antokolsky wrote to E. G. Mamontova, the wife of arts patron Savva Mamontov, delineating his artistic intentions in detail: 'My Mephistopheles represents the puzzlement, plague and putridity that poisons the air, that gets inside people and ruins them. Mephistopheles is relentless evil, an evil without end; ruthless, repulsive, nesting in an ill body with a collapsing soul. He is sick and suffering from having lived through everything, from decay, from an inability to take pleasure in life. His spirit is lifeless, he is incapable of creation, and yet he cannot hide his envy, pride and weakness. The warm spring rays of sunlight burn his skin and blind him. All forms of happiness, be they laughter or the kiss of young lovers, annoy him. He wants everything around him to be as dark, deathly, empty and lifeless as he is. To walk in darkness, to dig the ground like a mole, to ruin, to beget suffering, to see blood and tears pouring down-these are the things that calm and settle him, although he never quite takes pleasure in them, so unquenchable is his lust for lifelessness' (V. Stasov, ed., Antokolsky: His Creative Life, Letters and Articles, 1905, p. 441).