"Galloping Horse and Rider" 
Alessio Issupoff (1889 Russia-1957 Rome)
Oil on wood panel
Signed lower right
5 1/2 x8 1/2 (13 1/2 x 16 1/2 frame) inches
 
This is such a stunning little jewel, it's almost hard to believe. 
Alessio Issupoff dedicated his whole life to art and was shaped by his years at the Moscow School of Painting, and later absorbed a great deal from Impressionism and the work of the Italian Renaissance masters. But he kept his distinctive style and remained true to the idea that excited the generation of painters of the turn of the 20th century — “the embodiment of the great beauty of everything alive.”
 
Alexei Vladimirovich Isupov, known by his Italianized name Alessio Issupoff, was born in Vyatka (now Kirov) on March 10, 1889. The son of an icon carver and gilder, he learned to paint from the artisan painters who worked with his father. Wanting to give expression to his own artistic creativity, the young Alexei did not take up his father's trade but left Vyatka for Moscow where he attended the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.
 
His mentor was the painter Apollinary Mikhailovich Vasnetsov, brother of Viktor, who introduced him to the Moscow artistic milieu and helped him find work. 
 
By studying and visiting museums, Issupoff formed his own aesthetic “taste” by modifying it on contemporary Russian and French Renaissance art. In addition to Vasnetsov, his teachers were Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin, who educated him in genre painting, landscape painting and portraiture.
 
After obtaining his diploma in 1912, he began to travel in the Ural region. During the First World War, Issupoff was assigned to the Tashkent garrison where he was able to avoid the harshest experiences of the brutal conflict. After completing his military service, he traveled to Turkestan, immersing himself in a colorful and “magical” environment which would have a strong influence on his painting. Many of his best-known works, in fact, offer evocative visions of the most remote lands of Central Asia.
 
Having settled in Samarkand with his wife Tamara Nikolaevna, he served as director of the local Committee for the Restoration and Conservation of the city's works of art and monuments. He then perfected his technique on wooden panels, creating works whose style recalled traditional icon painting.
 
His return to Moscow in 1921 marked the beginning of the most difficult period of his private life. Finding himself in financial straits, Issupoff was reduced to being a "regime" artist, painting portraits of high-ranking Soviet leaders and scenes inspired by the Russian Revolution and the exploits of the Red Army. Once again, Vasnetsov helped him, finding him a paid job on one of the many Moscow Committees. Afflicted by health problems, in 1926 he went to Italy for treatment. His life then took a radical turn.
 
Italy was the place of his rebirth, both personal and artistic. Issupoff immediately found a warm and flattering welcome there. From the moment he arrived, he earned the respect of critics and the public. His first solo exhibition was held in Rome in 1926. Numerous other exhibitions followed in the most important cities of the peninsula, and in 1930, the 17th Venice Biennale "consecrated" the Russian painter's work. Enjoying esteem, affluence, and freedom of expression, the artist decided not to return home.
 
The difficulty of this decision was demonstrated by Issupoff's own production. Painting "from memory", he recreated the Russia he had left behind. Not the Soviet one, but the pre-revolutionary one he had known in his childhood and youth.
 
“The impressions he retains of his country return in his new paintings with a greater richness of motifs and breadth of development: misty lands, the rivers that furrow them, frozen and dark, the countryside white with snow, birch trees that embroider their silvery fronds among veils of mist, and horses grazing, at the sleigh, at the troika, at the plough.”
-Rizzoli, 1931
 
Nostalgia, combined with his poor health, worsened the depression that struck him in his old age, making him withdraw into his own home and isolate him from the world. In his last years, his wife Tamara recounted, “he painted very little and was never present at the inauguration of the exhibitions dedicated to him.”
 
He died in Rome on July 17, 1957. Nine years later, Tamara returned to Russia, bringing with her the paintings she had inherited from her husband. She donated many of these works to the art museum in Vyatka, Issupoff's hometown.
 
Given the frequency with which they appear in his works, it can be said that Issupoff was very fond of horses. “Issupoff's horses,” writes Giorgio Nicodemi, “are not those of elegant gatherings (...) they are those of peasants or small Russian landowners, harnessed to carriages or ridden by people who know how to ride well.”
 
As a young man, Issupoff could have been labelled an “orientalist painter”, while in his mature age he was mainly a portraitist and landscape painter. The broad brushstrokes and the supremacy given to color (rather than to drawing) express his desire to highlight the spirit rather than the form of things. This is evident in some scenes painted with such elementary lines that they border on a sketch. It would seem, then, that the vivid subjectivity of the artist Issupoff prevails over the "objective" world. He, therefore, "is to be placed among the masters who took from Impressionism the norm of an open and light-filled painting"
 
Alessio Issupoff had numerous personal exhibitions throughout Europe, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, etc.
 
Works or art by Alessio Issupoff can be found in many European and Russian museum collections, including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Galleries of Modern Art in Milan and Naples, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.