... of a secure national base merely complicates things. From the start painting was his consuming passion. But he was pushed by his parents to study medicine and law before launching himself definitively on the art world. This he did in his mid-twenties, when his monumental painting A Letter from Home was bought by Pavel Tretiakov for the Tretiakov Gallery. He began exhibiting regularly with the Wanderers group of painters, who were starting to tinge solid academic realism with lessons learnt from Impressionism. He was soon well established - friend of Tolstoy, faculty member of the Moscow School of Painting, founder of the Union of Russian Artists, widely exhibited at home and abroad. But the Revolution brought problems. Though politically respectable he was out of sympathy with the new wave of young revolutionary artists who dominated the early years of Soviet rule. In 1921 he moved to Berlin with most of his family, ...

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