Konstantin Korovin

Konstantin Korovin brought a loose, high-keyed brush to Russian painting when most of it was still telling careful stories. He had picked up the freedom of the French Impressionists and used it on Paris boulevards at night, all wet lights and smeared reflection, and on tables crowded with roses, fish, and fruit.

He was as much a man of the theatre as of the easel. For the private opera of the railway magnate Savva Mamontov, and later for the great Moscow houses, he designed sets and costumes that flooded the stage with colour, and he counted the singer Feodor Chaliapin among his close friends.

The revolution unsettled everything, and in 1923 Korovin left for Paris, meaning to work and to treat his ailing son. He never returned. He spent his last years there writing warm memoirs of the old Russian art world, and he died in Paris in 1939, still turning out Russian winter scenes and Paris boulevards for the dealers.