each oil on board
30.5 x 40.6 cm (12 x 16 in.); the companion 20.3 x 27.9 cm (8 x 11 in.)

comprising:
a) a portait of the artist's wife Devika Rani (recto) and study of a woman (verso)
b) a landscape of the Himalays by an unknown artist. The second painting features a dedication to Svetoslav Roerich and his wife from the Yoga followers in Russian: Dear Svetoslav Nikolaevich! Participants of the International scientific and public conference "Altai-Himalayas-91", dedicated to the spiritual heritage of E.P.Blavatskaya, with the help of this work express their veneration of the contribution of the Roerichs' family to the spiritual rebirth of humanity and wish you and your wife Devika Rani-Roerich light and joy!

LOT NOTES
Svetoslav Roerich, son and chief collaborator of Nikolai Roerich, was a Russian-born painter, architect, illustrator and designer. Roerich’s peripatetic youth, from Russia to Finland to Great Britain to the United States, eventually led him to India, where he moved in 1931 and where he would go on to spend the rest of his life. Per his wishes, he was buried in Bangalore, at the 25-acre "Tataguni" estate he owned with his wife - soon to be remodeled into a museum of Roerich’s work. While Roerich began painting at a young age, it is his later portraits - including those of Nehru and Indira Gandhi at the historic Central Parliament Hall in New Delhi, his father and his wife Devika Rani, depicted here - that constitute the best-known part of his oeuvre.

Film producer and actress (once student of Marlene Dietrich) Devika Rani, whose performances in some of the most popular films of the Indian Golden Age of Cinema earned her the title of “The First Lady of the Indian Screen,” married Roerich in 1945. Devika Rani sat for multiple large-scale paintings and countless drawings, some of the most sensitive portraits Roerich produced. Shown in profile, her chin upturned, her gaze undisturbed, Devika Rani imparts an air of composed sophistication. Her elegantly coiffed curled hair, softly highlighted skin, set against a background of mauve pink, as opposed to the majority of her portraits by Roerich, is less fraught with detail and decidedly more modernistic. Roerich outlines her silhouette with a single undulating stroke, parallelling her posture with three teal-colored forms at the lower left.

The present portrait is accompanied by a mountainscape, dedicated to Roerich by members of the Altai-Himalayas Conference, whose name references Nikolai Roerich’s eponymous diaries. Like his father and mother, Svetoslav Roerich was deeply dedicated to the statues of the Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments, better known as the Roerich Pact, which, through his efforts, was signed by the Indian government in 1948. Besides an emphasis on the support of arts and sciences, the Roerichs were deeply influenced by the esoteric teachings of Theosopher Helena Blavatsky, referenced in the dedication. Throughout his life in India, Roerich actively lobbied for conservation efforts for ancient Indian art and monuments, and was, along with his parents, an inspiration to groups like those that organized the Conference.