NIKOLAI SAKS (1842 – after 1918) Trinity Cathedral in Novomoskovsk (Samar)

signed in Cyrillic and dated ‘N Saks 1884’ (lower right), inscribed in Cyrillic ‘Novomoskovsky Zaporozhsky Sobor’ (in the lower margin) pencil on paper 27 x 37 cm executed in 1884 Nikolai Eduardovich Saks was a landscape painter born in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro, Ukraine). He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg (1872–1877), where he was awarded a small silver medal for landscape studies. Between 1879 and 1882 he lived in Paris and was associated with the Society for Mutual Aid and Charity of Russian Artists organised by Aleksei Bogolyubov, where the writer Ivan Turgenev served as secretary and Saks assisted in the administration of the society. Saks exhibited widely during his career, including an exhibition in Ekaterinoslav in 1892 and a retrospective marking thirty-five years of artistic activity at the Kyiv Art, Industrial and Scientific Museum in 1912. In 1920 he emigrated, settling first in Poland and later in Germany.