14 Facts About Zinaida Serebriakova

Zinaida Serebriakova's father, Evgenii Lansere, was a sculptor and her mother, Ekaterina Lansere, was a painter.

Zinaida Serebriakova's grandfather, Nicholas Benois, was a prominent architect, chairman of the Society of Architects and member of the Russian Academy of Science.

Zinaida Serebriakova's uncle, Alexandre Benois, was a painter, founder of the Mir iskusstva art group.

One of Zinaida Serebriakova's brothers, Nikolay Lanceray, was an architect, and her other brother, Yevgeny Yevgenyevich Lanceray, had an important place in Russian and Soviet art as a master of monumental painting and graphic art.

Zinaida Serebriakova studied with Ilya Repin in 1901 and portrait artist Osip Braz between 1903 and 1905.

From 1914 to 1917, Zinaida Serebriakova produced a series of pictures on the theme of Russian rural life including Peasants, Sleeping Peasant Girl.

Zinaida Serebriakova was left without any income, responsible for her four children and her sick mother.

Zinaida Serebriakova had to give up oil painting in favour of the less expensive techniques of charcoal and pencil.

Zinaida Serebriakova did not want to switch to the Suprematist or Contructivist styles popular in the art of the early Soviet period, nor paint portraits of commissars, but she found some work at the Kharkov Archaeological Museum, where she made pencil drawings of the exhibits.

Zinaida Serebriakova was fascinated by the landscapes of northern Africa and painted the Atlas mountains, as well as Arab women and Africans in ethnic clothing.

Zinaida Serebriakova's works were finally exhibited in the Soviet Union in 1966, in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, to great acclaim.

Zinaida Serebriakova's albums sold by the millions, and she was compared to Botticelli and Renoir.

Zinaida Serebriakova died after a brain hemorrhage in Paris on 19 September 1967, at the age of 82.

Zinaida Serebriakova is buried in Paris, at the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.