Charming Woman in Blue by Feodor Zakharov (Russia/New York, 1882-1968), oil on canvas, signed and dated 1944, framed - 34" x 40" 
 
Fedor Zakharov was born in 1882 in Astrakhan, Russia. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and he began to exhibit in 1911 and quickly established himself as a versatile painter of landscapes, still lifes and portraits. As an exhibitor and member of the committee organising The Russian Art Exhibition planned for New York City in 1924, Zakharov travelled to the USA and subsequently settled in New York, where he opened his studio on Central Park South in 1932. Zakharov's distinctive portraiture, often incorporating Renaissance landscapes, proved to be extremely popular amongst fashionable high society in New York and he received a number of important commissions including that of the former US Ambassador to China, the collector Charles Crane, and Mrs Woodrow Wilson. Zakharov exhibited widely, holding solo exhibitions in Philadelphia (1924), Paris (1933) and New York (1934), and contributed to the International Exhibition of Modern Art held at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1925. He received critical acclaim for his works Reverie and Ballerina, which received the Walter Lippincott award at the 123rd exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy in 1928 and the popular prize in the Corcoran Gallery's 15th Biennial Exhibition in Washington in 1937, respectively. As a measure of his international success, today Zakharov's work is represented in the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, The Detroit Institute of Art, The White House collection in Washington and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, to whom he left his archives after his death in 1968.