Portrait of a Young Girl by Alexei Harlamoff

Alexei Harlamoff was born in the village of Dyachevka near Saratov on the Volga. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, and he won both a Gold Medal and a scholarship in 1868. The scholarship enabled him to travel to Paris, where he studied under portrait painter Léon Bonnat, and by 1874 he was visited by Russian marine painter Alexei Bogoliubov, who reported back to Russia on the young artist’s visible success.

In 1875, Harlamoff exhibited his portraits of Louis and Pauline Viardot to great acclaim, marking a turning point in his career. French writer Emile Zola found these portraits to be marvellous, and he too predicted the “debut of a great talent.” Writer Ivan Turgenev was enchanted with the “little portrait-heads,” so much that he openly called Harlamoff his favorite painter. By 1883, the artist had garnered international acclaim, and a writer for Novoe Vremia wrote of the extraordinary demand for the Russian’s work from private collectors and art dealers in both London and Paris.

Works by Harlamoff are found in the J Paul Getty Museum in California, the Athenean Museum in Taiwan and The Alexander III Museum in St Petersburg.