The apparition

The Apparition, dated 1938, was painted in the final year of Somov's life — he died in May 1939 — making it among his very last completed works. By 1938 he was in his mid-seventies and his health was declining, yet he continued working in the Paris studio he had maintained since the early 1920s. An apparition subject in Somov's final year carries obvious autobiographical resonance, though it would be sentimental to read it too directly as a meditation on mortality. Throughout his career he had been drawn to the uncanny border between worlds — the theatrical masked ball where identity dissolves, the eighteenth-century garden where past and present interpenetrate — and an apparition subject continues that engagement with the threshold between visible reality and something beyond it. His late work maintains technical control even as the subjects become more inward. The Apparition belongs to the intimate final chapter of one of Russian art's most refined sensibilities.

A late 1938 Somov canvas would retain the technical refinement of his academic training while showing the slight loosening of execution characteristic of old age. The apparition subject would require careful handling of transparency, luminosity, or ghostly dissolution — effects that demand control of paint medium and layering.