A painting by Valdimir Tretchikoff has sold for $1.7 million.
The painting, “Lady of the Orient,” depicts a glamorous woman with east Asian features, wearing a green and gold gown.
This and many other Tretchikoff paintings were reproduced as prints or used as designs on handbags or cushions, for example. These reproductions helped make Tretchikoff wealthy.
The painting was bought by an anonymous buyer in an auction last week. It eclipsed the previous record, when Tretchikoff’s “Chinese Girl” was sold for nearly a million pounds in 2013.
Tretchikoff was born in what is today Kazakhstan in 1913. After the Russian Revolution in 1917 his family fled to Harbin in China, which at the time had a large Russian émigré population.
He worked for the British government during the Second World War, before settling in Cape Town in 1946. He lived in the city until his death in 2006.