Osipovich Leonid Pasternak (1862-1945)

The initial art education LO Pasternak received in Odessa School. Later, he successfully combined his studies at the Law Faculty of the University of Odessa and in the classrooms of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

The first major painting "Letter from the homeland" (1889) brought him fame and was acquired by Pavel Tretyakov.
Same year Pasternak married, and in 1890, the son of a son Boris (later known Russian writer).

Participation in exhibitions portraying customers have created a solid reputation of good artist painter. It opened in 1889, a private school of drawing, one of the first in Moscow, and five years later he was invited as a teacher in the Moscow School of Painting.

At the heart of the creative method wizard lay fast, almost instantaneous sketches, grasping "the essence of the depicted," he called them a school of "real Impressionism." Experience a sense of fixing the artist managed to keep in the paintings of - by the choice of the most poignant moments, like the random motion, revealing the image ("Before the exams," 1897 "by Leo Tolstoy in the Family", 1901, "student", " Reading ", both 1900s, etc.).

In the 1890s. Pasternak had made the best works in the field of book design: the drawings to the collected works of Mikhail Lermontov (1891), four watercolors for the novel "War and Peace" (1893). At the personal invitation of Leo Tolstoy, in constant companionship with the great writer artist created in 1898-99. illustrations for the novel "Resurrection", still remains unsurpassed.

By the turn of the century, Pasternak - a recognized portrait artist and illustrator, founding member of the CPX, since 1905 - the academician. In the next decade, his models were Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, FI Chaliapin, Gorky, after 1917 - Lenin, the members of the government. In 1921, Pasternak went to Germany. Here he made portraits of Einstein, Rilke, D. Osborne. The last years of his life (after 1939), the artist spent in England.