Valentin Serov

Origins and early life

Valentin Serov was born in Saint Petersburg on 19 January 1865 to the composer Alexander Serov and to the composer and music critic Valentina Bergman, and it is through his mother that the site records him: Valentina's parents, Simon Bergman, a German Jewish merchant of Warsaw settled in Saint Petersburg, and his wife Augusta Hudschon, were both born Jewish. This fiche states plainly that they left Judaism, converting to the Reformed or Lutheran church before their daughter's birth in 1846, so that Serov himself was raised in no Jewish practice; his eligibility rests on two named Jewish-born grandparents, which is the site's rule.

Work and career

His father died when he was six, and his mother placed him with Ilya Repin, who taught him from the age of nine, and then at the Academy under Pavel Chistyakov. At twenty-two he painted Girl with Peaches, a portrait of Vera Mamontova at Abramtsevo, and then Girl in Sunlight, two canvases that turned Russian painting toward light and immediacy and are still its most loved. He became the most sought-after portraitist in Russia, painting Chaliapin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Levitan, the merchant patrons of Moscow, the imperial family and Nicholas II himself, and later Ida Rubinstein in a stripped, linear manner close to Art Nouveau.

He resigned from the Academy of Arts in 1905 in protest at the shooting of demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, which he had witnessed from its windows. He died in Moscow on 5 December 1911, at forty-six.