Strauss & co - 10 October 2016, Cape Town

593 Vladimir Griegorovich TRETCHIKOFF SOUTH AFRICAN 1 913-2006 After the Masquerade signed and dated 52 oil on canvas 77 by 72cm R500 000–700 000 PROVENANCE Purchased at the artist’s exhibition in Cape Town in 1952 by the current owner’s father. EXHIBITED Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Tretchikoff: The People’s Painter , 26 May - 25 September 2011, catalogue number 49. According to Boris Gorelik, acknowledged Tretchikoff expert and author of Incredible Tretchikoff : Life of an Artist and Adventurer : After the Masquerade was also known as After the Party, After the Ball and After the Carnival . Tretchikoff identified his style as ‘symbolic realism’. Nowhere was it more prominent than in his orchid studies. In China, where Tretchikoff spent his teenage years, poets and painters saw the orchid as an emblem of love and refinement. On Java, where Tretchikoff lived during the war, the flower was endowed with mystical powers. In Singapore, where he started to paint, orchids bloomed in almost every garden. After the Masquerade (or After the Party ) conveys Tretchikoff’s belief that flowers are living organisms, capable of feeling pain. In composition, this work is similar to the Lost Orchid , of which he once said: ‘The orchid represents life. People use it and throw it away afterwards, without thinking. That is why now it is abandoned, lost, crying!’ In 1952 a land surveyor from Riversdale attended Tretchikoff’s exhibition in Cape Town. He was so taken with it that he drove all the way home and returned the next day with his wife, only to find that the exhibition had closed. So the couple visited Tretchikoff at his studio and there they saw After the Masquerade , a sequel to the well-known work Lost Orchid . The gentleman from Riversdale liked it so much that he bought it for 125 guineas (an equivalent of today’s £12,000). His wife protested strongly as the family was up against hard times and could not afford such a valuable work of art. To appease her, her husband swore that he would give up liquor for a year if she let him keep this painting. The couple drove the 300 km back to Riversdale without speaking, with the painting in the boot. Nine years later, they attended a Tretchikoff show in Cape Town. Tretchikoff remembered them and invited them to come and have a drink. The wife beamed, ‘No thanks, not only has my husband kept his word, but he has never touched a drop since’. When Tretchikoff mentioned to them that the value of this canvas had appreciated considerably, the wife replied, ‘This picture has saved us so much money that I wouldn’t sell it for twenty times the price.’ Because it was purchased directly from the artist, After the Masquerade was not listed in Tretchikoff’s catalogues and was never reproduced for sale to the public. 272