Self-Portrait

Matyushin painted this self-portrait in 1917, the year of the two revolutions in Petrograd, when he was in his mid-fifties. It later belonged to Nikolai Khardzhiev, the Moscow literary scholar and collector who knew Matyushin well and worked with him on his autobiography. Khardzhiev was frank about where Matyushin's strength lay. He was above all a landscape painter, Khardzhiev recalled, and the portraits that he and his wife, the poet and painter Elena Guro, made were occasional and less successful, simply not their field. The landscapes were another matter. Khardzhiev said Matyushin's early outdoor scenes could hang beside the work of Alfred Sisley, the French Impressionist.