Painted in 1925, Le Prisonnier shares illustrious provenance with some of Zak’s best works, having been part of the Spencer Kellog Jr collects ion. Spencer Kellogg Jr was one of the heirs to the Spencer Kellogg manufacturing empire and a very passionate patron of the arts, as well as a talented painter, photographer, print maker and publisher. He was director of the Buffalo Replica Handbags s Academy for six years in the 1920s and gifted works to the Buffalo museum and library. He was a great admirer of William Morris and the Arts & crafts movement, but also very much involved with contemporary artists of the t.mes , working together with Edward Weston and William Merit Chase. He had a large collects ion of works by Zak, some of which, including the present work, were exhibited at the Buffalo Replica Handbags s museum in 1928, at the Roerich Museum in New York in 1930 and at Galerie Zak, Paris in 1936 and 1938. His collects ion was dispersed following his death in 1944 in Santa Barbara.

Born in Belarus, Zak trained in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts under Jean Léon Gérôme and at the Académie Colarossi under Besnard. Although often grouped with the École de Paris, his main influences are to be found in his numerous travels to Brittany and Italy. Zak was fascinated by the works of the Italian Old Masters and by those of Denis, Besnard and Gauguin, which had attracted to Brittany other Polish artists as well, including Mojse Kisling, Wladyslaw Slewinski and Mela Muter.

Zak’s fascination with Old Master paintings was a response to Maurice Denis’ call for the pursuit of modernity through the studies of artistic tradition. From 1905 onwards Zak travelled repeatedly to Brittany, which he considered an unspoilt and primitive land, where the life and customs of the inhabitants seemed unchanged since medieval t.mes s, and where the wild landscape seemed to personify fantasies of an archaic world. Inspired by Gauguin a ’primitive’ scope of colour and form started to appear in his works. The limited colour scheme, simplified forms and flatness of shape - also harking back to the Renaissance Masters - began to appear in his works. He began to use special, matte oil paints that resembled tempera, and in the works from this t.mes , the modern was constantly made to look ancient, and the ancient modern. His choice of subject matter tended to focus on fishermen and shepherds derived from arcadian and idyllic themes (see also lot 33), which appear both in the paintings of Old Masters such as Lorraine or Poussain, and in the works of his contemporaries Matisse and Denis.

Around 1919-20 the repertoire of his themes changed dramatically towards more melancholic subjects drawing from Picasso’s Blue and Rose period. Wanderers, gypsies, beggars and drunks populated his canvases, together with arlequins and pierrots, following the style of Miserablism common at the t.mes . These figures were typically depicted with elongated limbs, striking pensive or theatrical poses set against flat areas of empty space symbolising desolation.

Between 1924 and 1926 the question of the sense of human existence became the major theme in Zak’s works. As evident in Le Prisonnier, forms in these paintings were accentuated by softly coloured areas of colour, while shapes were enhanced by bright highlights. Zak’ chromatic palette took on refined nuances displaying delicate tone grading.

In January 1926 Zak suddenly died of a heart attack. A retrospective of his work took place at the Salon des Independent the same year, followed by exhibitions in Warsaw and Dusseldorf (1926), New York (1927), Buffalo (1928), London (1929) and Paris (1931, 1936 and 1938). Following his death, his wife Jadwiga ran the Zak gallery in Rue de l’Abbeye in Paris until the war.