Paulo Troubetskoy (Italian, 1866-1938) Portrait of a young girl Oil on canvas 36 x 25-1/2 inches (91.4 x 64.8 cm) Signed and dated upper right: Paul Troubetzkoy 190(?) Property from the Dr. Sheldon G. and Irma H. Gilgore Collection of Italian Art 1850-1925 PROVENANCE: Finarte, Milan, October 29, 1992, lot 29; Interart Cultural Exchange, New York; Acquired from the above, April 1, 1994. EXHIBITED: The Gilgore Collection, Naples, Florida, "The Winds of Change, The Milanese Avant-Garde 1860-1900," 2003, no. 39; Stadel Museum, Frankfurt, "En Passant: Impressionism in Sculpture," March 19 - October 25, 2020, no. 114. LITERATURE: The Gilgore Collection, Winds of Change, The Milanese Avant-Garde 1860-1900, exh. cat., Naples, Florida, 2003, p. 111, no. 39, illustrated; Stadel Museum, Frankfurt, En Passant: Impressionism in Sculpture, exh. cat., 2020, pp. 235, 239, no. 114, illustrated. Paulo Troubetskoy's Portrait of a Young Girl can be understood within the artist's broader attempt to translate sculptural sensibilities into painting, a practice noted by contemporaries and later scholars as central to his pictorial language. As discussed in En passant: Impressionism in Sculpture (Betz, Eiling, and Mongi-Vollmer, 2020, pp. 234-5), Troubetskoy's paintings from around 1905, such as Portrait of a Girl, reject a strict separation between figure and space, instead allowing forms to "fuse" through a highly animated surface treatment. This approach results in a deliberately fragmented contour and a vibrating interplay of light and shadow, recalling the tactile immediacy of modeled clay, and echoing the style of the Scapigliati painters with whose work Troubetskoy was intimately familiar. The handling of paint is particularly significant: broken brushwork and nuanced tonal transitions create a sense of flickering light that does not simply describe form but actively constructs it. The text emphasizes how Troubetskoy's "impermeable bronze surface" in sculpture finds a pictorial analogue in painting through the refraction of light across discontinuous strokes, producing tonal values that emerge dynamically rather than through linear definition. In the Portrait of a Young Girl, this manifests in the dissolution of edges, especially in fabrics and surrounding space, where highlights and shadows intermingle, causing the figure to move between a firm presence and a dissolving atmosphere. Such effects align Troubetskoy with an Impressionist concern for transient visual perception, yet his method remains distinct in its sculptural logic. Critics at the time even described his rare works on canvas as a kind of "Impressionist sculpture," underscoring the hybrid quality of his practice . The portrait thus exemplifies an innovative cross-media dialogue, in which painting becomes a site for exploring the material and perceptual problems traditionally associated with sculpture. HID12401132022 © 2026 Heritage Auctions | All Rights Reserved www.HA.com/TexasAuctioneerLicenseNotice

The Gilgore Collection, Naples, Florida, "The Winds of Change, The Milanese Avant-Garde 1860-1900," 2003, no. 39; Stadel Museum, Frankfurt, "En Passant: Impressionism in Sculpture," March 19 - October 25, 2020, no. 114.

Finarte, Milan, October 29, 1992, lot 29; Interart Cultural Exchange, New York; Acquired by the present owner from the above, April 1, 1994.

Strip-lined along sides of canvas. Craquelure throughout. Horizontal cross bar creases visible at the center of canvas. Pinpoint abrasion to right of figure's head. Edgewear, with .25" loss along upper left edge. Another small (<.25") loss in figure's hair.
Under UV: no apparent inpainting.
Framed Dimensions 42.25 X 31.5 Inches