Sotheby’s forthcoming auction of Russian Art in New York will feature paintings and works of art with exceptional provenance and art historical importance. The paintings on offer will be led by works from iconic Russian artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, including 19th-century masters Ivan Aivazovsky, Isaac Levitan and Henryk Siemiradzki. Petr Petrovich Vereshchagin’s View of St. Petersburg, one of the most magnificent cityscapes by the artist ever to appear at auction, will be sold by Mikhail Baryshnikov to benefit the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Several other significant works come to auction directly from private collections, including Nicholas Roerich’s extremely rare design for The Novgorod Market from Sadko, 1920, as well as Boris Grigoriev’s extraordinarily dramatic Still Life with Candle and Pot from the mid-1920s. A series of four superb works by Socialist Realist painter Yuri Pimenov will also be offered, led by The Pianist, a highly dynamic work from the earliest and most revolutionary period of the artist’s career, as well as Worker’s Brigade, a composition closely related in style and subject matter to the artist’s monumental First of May Celebration, 1950, which achieved the record-setting price of $1,538,500 at Sotheby’s New York last November.