AN EXHIBITION OF PICTURES 

 BY A RUSSIAN ARTIST. 



E. B. HOWELL. 



The Society was fortunate at the end of last year to have 

 an opportunity of inspecting a series of water-colour and 

 crayon pictures of Chinese and Mongolian life which broke 

 entirely new ground in the pictorial representation of the 

 peoples of this portion of the Far East. Many European 

 artists have visited China but their work has hitherto been 

 confined to scenery, architecture, and human types which, 

 while interesting enough, were so mainly for reasons of 

 picturesqueness that would have justified their portrayal in 

 any part of the globe. 



The work in China of Mr. Alexander Iacovleff, however, 

 stands alone. He is a young Kussian, who, having won by 

 his art in Petrograd before the war a scholarship that enabled 

 him to pursue his studies in any part of the world he fancied, 

 selected the Far East as the scene of his labours. He lived 

 for eighteen months in China and is now working in Japan. 

 Mr. Iacovleff has approached his immense subject from a 

 point of view which has either not appealed to or has 

 appalled all previous workers. He has chosen as the subjects 

 of his pictures in China not the curling roofs and temple 

 walls, the pagodas and the sunsets, that have so engrossed, 

 and with reason enough, other artists, but the human beings 

 that he saw around him— the ragged beggar, the petty shop- 

 keeper, the obese compradore, the bawling virago, and, m 

 Mongolia, scenes of religious celebration and of tent and 

 pastoral life— uniting the touch of the artists with the keen 

 vision of the student of anthropology to an extent which 

 entitles his work to be called unique. 



To produce satisfactory photographs of human subjects 

 in China is rendered a difficult enough task by reason of the 

 curiosity and the superstitious fears of the lower classes, to 

 say nothing of the reluctance felt by most Europeans to 

 coming into close contact with a Chinese crowd. But to be 

 able to show such careful and accurate human documents as 

 Mr Iacovleff has produced, under circumstances which those 

 who live in China can well imagine, places Ins work well-nigh 



