NIKOLAI GRIGORIEV (1880-1943) Oriental tales

signed in Cyrillic ‘Grigoriev’(lower right); inscribed in pencil in Cyrillic ‘Vostochnye skazki / Eskiz [ Oriental fairytales/ Sketch]’ and numbered, label of the Grabar center (on the reverse) oil on board 25.4 x 34.7 cm Nikolai Mikhailovich Grigoriev was a Russian Soviet painter, lithographer, and graphic artist. From 1903 to 1909, he studied at the Kazan Art School (now the N. I. Feshin Kazan Art College) under P. P. Benkov and N. I. Feshin. Between 1909 and 1914, he attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (MUZhVZ), where his teachers included A. E. Arkhipov, Konstantin Korovin, and Leonid Pasternak. In the 1920s, Grigoriev contributed to group albums of artists who would later form the Makovets association, and during the same period taught at VKhUTEMAS. He began exhibiting in 1909 and was a member and exhibitor of the Moscow Salon (1916–1921), Makovets (1922–1926), and the Society of Moscow Artists (1928–1932). He held a solo exhibition in Moscow in 1920 and participated in major group shows, including the First Russian Art Exhibition at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin (1922) and Ten Years of Soviet Engraving (Moscow, 1927). Tashkent was among Grigoriev’s recurring and characteristic subjects.