Elizabeth Shoumatoff

Elizabeth Shoumatoff (Russian: Елизавета Николаевна Шуматова ; born Avinoff) ; * 1888 in Kharkiv , Russian Empire (now Ukraine); † November 30, 1980 in Glen Cove , New York ) was an American portrait painter . She is best known for her unfinished portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt , who collapsed during the April 12, 1945 session and died on the same day.

life and work

Unfinished portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Elisabeth Shoumatoff , 1945
30.48 x 25.4 cm
Little White House, Warm Springs Link to the picture (please note copyrights )

Elisabeth Avinov (mostly Avinoff) was born in 1888 in Kharkiv, Ukraine - part of the Russian Empire until the Revolution - as the daughter of a lieutenant general, received private lessons and began to paint at the age of six to pass the time. She married Lev Shumatov (usually Leo Shoumatoff), who was sent to the United States on a trade mission in 1917 during the interim government between the February and October Revolution . After the October Revolution, they decided to stay in the US. Leo Shoumatoff worked in a leading position at Sikorsky Aircraft , her older brother, himself a painter and butterfly collector , became curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Their integration into the conservative-republican upper class of the country was easy.

After her husband drowned in a swimming accident in 1928, Elisabeth Shoumatoff turned her hobby, watercolor painting , into a profession and began painting portraits of wealthy personalities on commission. In 1937, she met Lucy Mercer Rutherford , Eleanor Roosevelt's private secretary and former lover of the President, who later made contact with him. Shoumatoff was initially skeptical as to whether the Democrat would model her, a die-hard Republican, even mediated by a former lover.

A first smaller watercolor was created in 1943; in April 1945 the two women traveled to Warm Springs, where Roosevelt agreed to sit for Shoumatoff model in four sessions. During the second session, Roosevelt had a brain haemorrhage and died.

She did not finish the portrait that Shoumatoff had begun - only the face and part of the upper body were finished - it is kept as an unfinished portrait in the "Little White House", the former home, today Roosevelt Memorial in Warm Springs , to which she gave it . Shoumatoff later made a similar, complete portrait, which she also gave to the memorial in 1960.

In 1968 she was asked again to make a presidential portrait : Lyndon B. Johnson refused a portrait painted by the artist Peter Hurd and had a Shoumatoff painted. This was the template for a commemorative stamp on the occasion of Johnson's death in 1973.

Elisabeth Shoumatoff had two children, a daughter and a son. She lived in Locust Valley for many decades , painted until a few weeks before her death and died on November 30, 1980 in a nearby hospital.

In total, she left an oeuvre of more than 3,000 paintings.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Elizabeth Shoumatoff Papers, 1945-1994 | Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum. Retrieved February 22, 2020 (English). 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} The Associated Press (Ed.): Artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff Dead at 92 . 3rd December 1980.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Wolfgang Saxon: Elizabeth Shoumatoff, 92, Dead; Painted Portraits of 2 Presidents . In: The New York Times . December 1, 1980 Section D; Page 13, column 1; Cultural desk; Obituary, S. 13 .
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Major FDR Center Museum Announcement. (No longer available online.) In: fdrheritage.org. Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center, April 2006, archived from the original on August 7, 2008 ; accessed on February 22, 2020 (English).