Jackson's Auction Blog

I have literally held thousands of antique Russian icons in my hands. I can usually tell you pretty quickly what a Russian icon is worth, what time period it is from, and what story is being told. I can quickly identify if the painting is new on an old board or if the cracks are fake (to make the icon look older than what it is). Occasionally, our firm comes across an antique Russian icon with a story as interesting as the iconography and I thought I would share one such example with you

If you know anything about Russian history, you know who the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov is. His story is for another blog post, because today I only have time to tell you about this one icon. The icon itself depicts his name saint (in Russia, it was very common to commission a Russian icon of a saint that shares the name of the intended receiver – in this case, the Crown Prince) Saint Alexei Metropolitan of Moscow.

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Arguably, the two most recognizable paintings in the world today are Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Both have been reproduced and lampooned ad nauseam, and while most everyone can name the author of the Mona Lisa, not everyone can as easily recite the name of Grant Wood, even though they instantly recognize the image of the dour looking bespectacled farmer with pitchfork in hand and his spinster daughter. For a vast multitude of reasons, most would logically assume that these two painters have very little common, yet they do share one similar circumstance – very few oil paintings by either artist exist. For Da Vinci, there are perhaps a dozen oil paintings whereas there are hundreds of his drawings and for Grant Wood at best there are perhaps only two dozen easel size finished oil paintings from his mature (post American Gothic) period, and it is believed that of those only three are in private hands. [Read more]