Valentin Serov

At the age of 23, in 1888, Valentin Serov burst onto the Moscow art scene with his portrait, "Girl with Peaches". Painted in the Impressionist manner, this debut work heralded the change from 19th-century realism to 20th-century modernism in Russia. He quickly became the pre-eminent portraitist of Russia's Silver Age. This text casts the artist's work against the gilded age of turn-of-the-century Russia, an era when wealth and flashy consumption abounded as revolutionary change was taking place on all levels of society. Painting prominent people of the day in business, government, society, the nobility and the arts, Serov created a gallery of Russia's important figures - figures seen with a sharp eye and painted with subtle irony. Yet even when his commissions regularly included such lucrative subjects as the Tsar or captains of industry, Serov's paintings explored a fast-changing society through daring studies of women and probing character studies. Through the early 1900s he continued to learn from and react to new movements in western art, developing a distinctive style until his untimely death in 1911.