Eight ladies, two gentleman, one still life - paintings by Serge Ivanoff

Portrait of a Woman, 1944. (How can it be that the sitter's name isn't still attached to this remarkable portrait...?)

Serge Petrovitch Ivanoff (25 December 1893, Moscow – 8 February 1983, Paris), Russian painter. Born into a family of Moscow merchants, he was artistic from an early age; his parents enrolled him in art school at the age of ten. Later, at the height of the Russian Revolution, already in his twenties and having relocated to St.Petersburg with his family, he continued his studies at what had been the Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1920 his wife and two children fled Russia to settle in Paris and two years later, diploma in hand, he joined them there. Over the next few decades he established himself as a popular portraitist, with increasingly prestigious clientele; the Forties appear to have been the peak years of his career. In 1946 he married his eighteen-year-old pupil, Simone Gentile. (I haven't been able to ascertain what became of his first marriage, whether he divorced or was widowed.) In 1950 Ivanoff moved to the United States but, at the end of the Sixties, he returned to France where he later died at the age of eighty-nine.

Simone Gentile Holding a Book, 1946. (Gentile was the second wife of the artist, and an artist, herself.)

Edwige Feuillère, 1943 (?).

Jacques Fath, circa 1948.

Sacha Lio, 1932.

Lycette Darsonval as Giselle, 1941.

 

Simone Gentile in a Yellow Gown, 1954.

Princess Victoria Brancovan, 1948.

Guy Lainé, 1939 (?).

Portrait of a Woman, 1949.

Still Life With Dominoes, 1944.