Zinaida Evgenievna Serebryakova (née Lancere) is a Russian artist, a member of the World of Art society, a representative of neoclassicism, one of the first Russian women who entered the history of painting.

Her mother, Catherine, came from a family of hereditary Franco-Italian artists and architects, her father Eugene Lanceray, who belonged to the Benoit-Lanceray family, became famous as a gifted animal sculptor.

 

The future artist spent her childhood in the family estate Neskuchnoye and in St. Petersburg. Zinaida was greatly influenced by her uncles Alexander and Albert Benois.
She studied with the artist Ilya Repin and the portrait painter Osip Braz. In 1905, Zinaida married Boris Serebryakov. Zinaida improved her drawing skills at the Academy de la Grand Chaumiere. Upon her return, she devoted all her free time to her family, children (Zhenya, Sasha, Tata, Katya), her husband and drawing.

 

In the period until 1917, Serebryakova also actively worked on the village theme. The 1917 revolution found the Serebryakovs in the family estate Neskuchnoye. In 1919, her husband died, she was left alone with her children in Kharkov. In 1920-1924 Zinaida lived in Petrograd, working on a series of ballet scenes from the life of the Mariinsky Theater.

 

In 1924 she received an order from France for a large decorative panel and left for Paris. Leaving for several months for work turned into forced emigration, which lasted 43 years. With the help of Alexander Benois, her two children, Alexander and Catherine, came to France.

 

In May 1928, a large international exhibition was held in Brussels. where the works of Serebryakova were exhibited. There her painting made a strong impression on the Belgian art connoisseur - the industrialist Baron J. A. de Brauer. He ordered her portraits of his wife and daughter. Having completed these portraits, the baron invited her to Africa - Morocco for a month. During her trips to Morocco, Serebryakova's works reveal exotic plots: she makes a large series of studies and sketches - porters, genre paintings, landscapes. Brower paid all her travel expenses on the condition that he choose for himself some of her works created there.

 

Also, Zinaida Serebryakova repeatedly came to England to visit relatives. In an effort to earn money there, she made sketches and sketches, tried to sell her works, painted portraits to order, tried to establish the production of prints from her paintings. In London, she negotiated with various studios, workshops for the production of printed graphics, including at the Royal Academy of Arts.

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In 1966, a personal exhibition of Serebryakova's works created in exile was held in Moscow. The success was tremendous. Her albums have sold in the millions, and she has been compared to Botticelli and Renoir.

 

Pictures of Zinaida Serebryakova are in museum and private collections in many countries of the world. In 2015, Z. Serebryakova's painting "The Sleeping Girl" was sold at Sotheby’s auction for £ 3,845,000, which far exceeded the presale estimate of £ 400-600,000 and set a new auction record for the artist's painting.

 

Zinaida Serebryakova died in Paris. She was buried in Paris, in the Russian cemetery in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.