Drawing of the "Marquis" by the artist Konstantin Somov

Konstantin Somov is an outstanding Russian artist, one of the main masters of the Art Nouveau era and a member of the World of Art association. His works combine the refined style of the 18th century and theatrical decorativeness. Somov became famous as a painter, graphic artist and master of book illustration, whose work became a symbol of aestheticism of the Silver Age. Russian Russian Pastoral is highly appreciated at international auctions: in 2006, the painting "Russian Pastoral" set a record for Russian art when it was sold for 2.4 million pounds.

The collection "The Book of the Marquise" is considered one of the peaks of Russian book design of the early 20th century. This is the rarest anthology of erotic literature of the XVIII century, which includes the works of more than 50 French and German authors, including Voltaire, Casanova, Guys, Chenier. The collection was compiled by the Austrian literary critic Fran Bley and first published in German in 1907-1908 in Munich under the title Das Lesebuch der Marquise. The illustrations were commissioned by Somov, but the publication included only a part of the 30 drawings he created — the most explicit images were censored.

Somov's drawing "The Kiss", presented in the Stargift collection, refers specifically to the first, Munich edition of the collection. In 1918, the artist personally organized a new, significantly expanded French edition of the book in the Petrograd printing house of R. Golike and A. Wilborg — it became the last edition of this famous enterprise. Two editions were released: the main one, numbering 800 copies, and a limited one, the so-called "Big Marquise" (50 copies in total), with hand-colored illustrations, frivolous inserts and false output data (including the indication of Venice as the place of publication). It was thanks to these publications that The Marquise's Book and Somov's drawings for it went down in history as masterpieces not only of book graphics, but also of erotic genre art.

The exhibit is accompanied by the opinion of O. S. Glebova, an expert on cultural values of Rosokhrankultury and a member of the Association of Art Historians.