“There is a lump in my throat, so filled was my soul with the joy of sadness, the fear of hope, the regret of the past, the expectation of an unknown future. Do I have what it takes to make it, will I make it? There, behind the dark window, Paris is noisy, life goes on, and it must be depicted….”
Maria Yakunchikova’s mature period coincided roughly with the 1890s. Due to her health - she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in the late 1880s - she mostly lived in Paris and would visit Russia only during the summer months. There, she worked in Abramtsevo, Savva Mamontov’s country estate and artists’ colony which had become an important centre for Art Nouveau and the revival of Russian folk art, or at one of her family’s country houses. The last decade of the 19th century was a period of fervent artistic innovation both in Paris and Moscow. Yakunchikova was at home in both places, and in her work, she combined Russian influences with those of contemporary European art.
Yakunchikova was one of the first women in Russia to receive a formal artist education. Born in Wiesbaden into an old and wealthy Russian merchant family, she spent her childhood in Moscow and at her family’s Vvedenskoe estate, growing up in an artistic and cultured household. Her father was a talented violinist and patron of music; her mother was a Mamontov whose sister was married to Pavel Tretyakov, founder of the Tretyakov Gallery. In 1882, Maria’s sister Natalia married painter Vasily Polenov, and Maria grew particularly close to Elena Polenova, who became her mentor. From 1885, Maria attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, before settling in Paris in 1889, where she studied at the Académie Julian.
The present work, large in scale and one of the most accomplished in Yakunchikova’s oeuvre, dates from a pivotal period in her career, when she showed keen interest in Symbolism while developing her own visual language. Encouraged by the success of the etchings she had shown at the 1893 exhibition of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the Salon du Champ-de-Mars, she painted Reflection of an Intimate World specifically for the 1894 exhibition. In the picture, we see the reflection of a young woman in a window. She looks pensive and is holding her head in her hand. She is lit from behind by a lamp which is also reflected in the window. It is evening and through the window we can see the roofs of Paris. Windows are recurring motifs in Yakunchikova’s work, serving as an elevated view point onto the outside world. Windows also form a boundary between the private, intimate world of human emotions, thoughts and dreams, symbolised here by the reflections, and the real world outside.
Right: Fig. 2., Maria Yakunchikova-Weber, Window in Morevo, 1894. Ivanovo Regional Art Museum, Ivanovo.
In Russia, Yakunchikova was held in high esteem by her peers, notably Alexander Benois and Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned several covers for their new magazine Mir iskusstva (World of Art), and invited her to take part in their exhibitions. After Yakunchikova’s death from tuberculosis at the age of just 32 in Switzerland, Diaghilev wrote her obituary for Mir iskusstva. In 1905, Yakunchikova’s husband Lev Weber and the artist’s sister organised a retrospective of her work in Moscow, her first solo exhibition in Russia, which also included the present work. With the radical political and social changes taking place in the country the following decade, and with her artistic legacy split between Russia and Switzerland, it would take another 115 years until the Tretyakov Gallery would organise a second retrospective, in 2020. Today, Yakunchikova is rightly recognised as key figure in the development of Russian Symbolism and Art Nouveau, as well as a trailblazer for the many outstanding female artists of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century.