Riga, 1919

This painting stems from literature and history. But first of all, it is out of personal history. Riga, the capital of Lettonia, was a place where we used to live, about 150 years ago. The most elegant Austrian writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia in his “Mars in Aries” follows a story regarding a baroness from the Baltic family Pistohlkors. Also in his friend’s Leo Perutz “Little Apple” Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley von Hohenfelsen, whose mother had married Erich Gerhard von Pistohlkors before a morganatic marriage to her father the Granduke Pavel Aleksandorvic of Russia, as a young girl barely escaped the tragic Russian revolution , she was a model in Paris and, briefly, a movie actress in U.S.. This is all about the nostalgic tide that fills a heart when aware of a mythical past which won’t come back anymore. As the grey-white Baltic shores, the cold waves that faraway merge into a seldom blue sky. The model, as frequent, is the young BG, astonishingly similar in her features to the late Russian princess, French model and American movie actress.