Rare Signed Portrait Painting 1943 Elizabeth Shoumatoff FDR Unfinished
Item History & Price
| Reference Number: Avaluer:691500 |
Here is an excellent rare original signed portrait painting from 1943 by artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, two years before she painted the celebrated Unfinished Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Comes with a letter from and signed by the artist to the family who commissioned the portrait, expressing pleasure that they like it and referencing the frame; the family is the Dr. Webb family of New Jersey. Very well-framed (heavy frame). Dimensions: 19 1/2" by 22 1/2". On the back of the frame ...is a copy of a 1945 newspaper with a full-page print of the famed Unfinished Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which the family presumably affixed to the frame after FDR's death. Elizabeth Shoumatoff (Russian: Елизавета Николаевна Шуматова, née Avinoff) (1888 – 1980) was a Russian-American painter who was best known for painting the Unfinished Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Other paintings included portraits of Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson.S houmatoff was born in Moscow on October 6, 1888, into an aristocratic family in what was then Imperial Russia. Her brother Andrey Avinoff was a prominent entomologist and artist. Elizabeth Shoumatoff went to the United States with her husband Leo Shoumatoff (a member of the Russian Purchasing Commission) in 1917 and after the October Revolution decided to stay there. They eventually made their home on Long Island. Leo Shoumatoff died in 1928 (drowned). Shoumatoff's extraordinary talent for portraiture brought commissions from some of the most illustrious families in America, Great Britain and Europe. Her clients included members of the Frick, du Pont, Mellon, Woodruff and Firestone families, plus the Grand Ducal Family of Luxembourg. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was sitting for her at Warm Springs, Georgia, when he suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. When she was working, he said "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head." Shoumatoff died in November 1980 at age 92 and her estate donated some of the sketches related to the Unfinished Portrait to the Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center Museum. Some of her other works and materials from the latter part of her life are now in the Archives of American Art.
