Vladimir Tretchikoff's Auction Record Jumps 17% With $1.74m Sale

Vladimir Tretchikoff, Lady from the Orient (1955) sold for $1.74m (ZAR31.11m), more than six times the low estimate at Strauss & Co. in Johannesburg on May 27. The oil on canvas work, acquired directly from the artist, had not been traded before.

Tretchikoff held his first solo exhibition in Cape Town in 1948. Following its success, the Russia-born artist showed his work in the US Canada and England. As well as prolific, he was commerically successful, allowing the mass reproducion of his work, which critics often called kitsch, as affordable prints.

His model for Lady from the Orient was a 21-year-old called Valerie Howe, whose father was a greencrocer in Cape Town, where the artist settled in 1946. The image was one of a number his best-selling portraits of "exotic" women, the most famous of which was his painting Chinese Girl (1952) also based on a model he spotted in Cape Town.

Born in 1913 in what was then the Russian Empire, he led an adventurous life. He escaped the Russian Revolution to China as a child and was living in Shanghai when he met his wife, Natalie Telpregoff, who was also a Russian refugee. The couple moved to Singapore were they were living there when the city was captured by the Japanese in 1942. He was imprisoned but allowed to continue to paint and sell his works. After the end of WW2 he was reunited with his family in South Africa, where he remained until his death, aged 92, in 2006.

The sale beat the artist’s previous auction record by $252,800, a 17% rise. The previous record was set by Chinese Girl (Undated), which sold for $1.49m at Bonhams on March 20, 2013.