In 1875 the artist Nikolai Ge left St Petersburg which had been his home for four years and upped sticks with his family, exchanging their glamorous society life for a simple, rural existence in Northern Ukraine. There he bought a farmstead called Khutor Nikolaevsky (now Shevchenko) in Chernigov oblast and built a one-story wooden house and immersing himself in village life, working the fields, tending to livestock and bee-keeping when not in his studio. The family’s way of life was hugely influenced by the teachings of the writer Leo Tolstoy, who was a great friend and twice travelled to stay with them at Khutor Nikolaevsky. The artist’s eldest son, Nikolai, was extremely close with the Tolstoy family and spent much t.mes at Yasnaya Polyana. The Ge family shunned the trappings of wealth, engaged in charity work and at the t.mes the present portrait was painted, Nikolai the younger was married to a peasant woman called Agafya who worked as a cattle-herd on his father’s farm and with whom he had three children.

Tolstoy was to become a key figure in the future history of the present lot and of Ge’s legacy as a whole. After the artist’s death in 1894, Tolstoy began negotiations with Pavel Tretyakov ‘lest Russia’s national gallery be deprived of the works of her best painter’. Nikolai Ge, the artist’s son, delivered the contents of his father’s studio to the Tretyakov Gallery in 1897 (apart from those controversial works that had not made it past the censor in Ge’s lifet.mes which were wisely sequestered in the studio of Tolstoy’s eldest daughter Tatiana, herself an artist). Tretyakov had intended to hold an exhibition devoted to Ge but he was to die a year later. Following Tretyakov’s death, the new management council of the gallery allowed the artist’s son to reclaim a part of the donation which he took back with him to the khutor.

By this t.mes Nikolai the younger’s marriage with Agafya had dissolved and he was in a common-law marriage to Zoya Ge. Zoya was a cousin who grew up in France and Switzerland so the two hardly knew each other before she came to live at the khutor after her arrest for membership of the terrorist group Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) and the artist bailed her out, putting up the farm as assurance. After the breakdown of the Tolstoyan idyll and the family’s dispersal, Zoya and Nikolai the younger moved to Switzerland, a country familiar to both from their childhoods, with the six children they had between them.

Nikolai the younger worked tirelessly to secure the legacy of his father, organising exhibitions of his work in both Paris and Geneva, possibly including the present portrait, and most importantly publishing an illustrated album of his collects ed works in 1904 in which the present lot is illustrated (fig.1).

Zoya returned to Russia with her children, and after the death of both his sons Nikolai the younger was taken under the wing of Beatrice de Watteville who lived at Château de Gingins, near Lausanne. In 1936 he held an exhibition of his father’s work in the chateau and on his death in 1938 the entire collects ion passed to her.