Self Portrait with Wife and Portrait

Leonid Osipovich Pasternak was born in Odessa in 1862. He studied at the Odessa School of Arts and in 1881 was awarded a silver medal. After continuing his studies at the studio of E. Sorokina in Moscow and at the Academy of Art in Munich, Pasternak opened his own art school in Moscow and became a founder of the Union of Russian Painters in 1903. Already recognized as an important artist before the Revolution, he traveled extensively after 1921, moving from Berlin to Palestine and finally settling in England in 1938. During his travels, he painted or drew Europe's foremost artists and thinkers of the day-Lenin, Einstein, Rilke, Rachmaninov among them.