Der rastende Tscherkessenreiter. Ca. 1880/90s.
Oil on panel.
Signed lower left. 24 x 32 cm (9,4 x 12,5 in).
With stamp "Franz Dury München" on verso as well as another barely legible stamp.

Franz Roubaud was born in Odessa son of French immigrants from Marseille. His parents were purveyors to the imperial Russian court. Roubaud had a carefree childhood and finds his life’s two great passions at an early point: horseback riding and drawing. Roubaud moved to Munich in 1877 in order to study art, he began at the Academy as student of Carl Theodor von Piloty, Otto Seitz and Wilhelm von Dietz. In 1881 he traveled to Odessa, a little later to Southern France, his parents‘ home. A sojourn in Paris followed, before he finally completed his studies in Munich under the Polish history painter Jozef von Brandt in 1881. In the circle of Polish painters at the Munich school, namely with Brandt and Alfred von Wierusz-Kowalski, Roubaud found likeminded artists. The themes they share are depictions of the Caucasus, wild and vast landscapes with horsemen, Circassians and Cossacks, oriental market- and city scenes. Roubaud traveled to the Caucasus for the first time in his childhood, in 1883 and 1884 he went to the remote mountain regions between The Black and Caspian Sea again and found the motifs that would determine his painting over years and would substantially contribute to his success. He received commissions from the Russian government, was supported by the Bavarian prince regent Luitpold and won numerous medals on international exhibitions. His monumental works are particularly impressive, Roubaud often made them in a remarkably short time together with Munich artist friends. Among them is a cycle of 17 large-sized paintings for the hall of fame in Tiflis as well as three panoramas of battle scenes from latest history. These then very popular huge panorama scenes, round paintings in buildings that were mostly exclusively made for this purpose, had a standard size of 115 meters in length and a height of 15 meters. For study purposes Roubaud time and again traveled to the Caucasus and other historic places.

The painting Der rastende Tscherkessenreiter“ (Resting Circassian Horseman) is a very characteristic work of Roubaud, who painted countless large river crossing of riding Circassians in ever new variations. His sense for calmer scenes, in spite of his reputation as a famous painter of battle scenes, is clearly proven by this painting in which Roubaud shows a great talent for observation: the short rest of a single Circassian with his horse at the shallow banks of the river. The combination of light colors, making the gleaming sunlight almost palpable for the observer, and the strong color accent on the clothing and the saddlecloth are quite characteristic.

In 1903 Roubaud was offered professorship for battle painting at the St. Petersburg Academy, which he presumably did not accept before 1908 because of the Russian Revolution. Until 1911 he taught at the Academy, and then returned to his adopted home Munich and turned to his last great panorama, the „Battle of Borodino“. In 1928 Roubaud died in Munich and was buried on the island of Frauenchiemsee, where he had spent many summers. [CB]