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The Green Room

The Artist's Studio

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So in this room, Leonid spent the last six years of his life, and it was his bedroom and his studio and his museum, the place for his collection, his archive, but it also had the wardrobe where his wife's clothes were hanging and her bottle of scent was still, he could smell it because she had died before he moved from London to Oxford, into this room in the house where his daughter's, husband's parents lived.

He had a settee and a Biedermeier settee in that corner to the right of the fireplace, and the fireplace was constantly burning and crackling away. My brothers can remember the sound of it and they can remember the smells of the oils, oil paintings in the room. And then there was the wardrobe with his wife's clothes and there was a big clavichord case where he kept up, he kept his rolled up canvases.

And on the outside of the door, there was a sign that he'd painted himself saying 'private' in italic capitals because the house had five rooms on the top two floors that were let to students and the parents in-law's rooms above, and then his daughter and her four children in the bottom bit of the house. It was all the years of the war. There were a lot of refugees coming and going. The house welcomed a lot of people and he sat in his room, read his books, and painted.

He did paint one picture from out of the window where he could see a silver birch in the setting sunlight.

After he died, my mother locked the room up. And nobody went into it and everything was just kept there as it was when he died.

There was a painting from memory of Lenin on the easel, which we still have.

And my mother and her sister then tried to make order out of all of this material, and gradually people started looking at the pictures and being interested in an artist who was not an Englishman and not a familiar figure at all. So it was very difficult for my mother and her sister to set up a reputation for him. Which is why in the end we set up this charitable trust to preserve his work and show it to the public.

And in this room we have a very wide collection of paintings from one of his earliest paintings, which is of his mother, to one from the years in Berlin which is the thing you first see when you come into the room and is a magnificent still life, and some very intimate little drawings on the other walls and some formal portraits.

In this room, Leonid spent the last six years of his life. It was his bedroom, his studio and his museum – the place for his collection, his archive. [1] But it also had the wardrobe where his wife's clothes were hanging, and her bottle of still-perceptible scent which he kept there, even though she had died before he moved from London to Oxford, into this room in the house where his daughter's English parents-in-law lived.

He had a Biedermeier settee in that corner to the right of the fireplace [2], and the fire was constantly burning and crackling away. My brothers can remember the sound of it and they can remember the smells of the oil painting that went on in this room. And then there was the wardrobe with his wife's clothes and there was a big clavichord case where he kept his rolled up canvases.

On the outside of the door, there was a sign that he'd painted himself, saying 'private' [3] in italic capitals, because the house had five rooms on the top two floors that were let out to students. Then there were the parents-in-law's rooms, and then his daughter and her four children in the bottom bit of the house. This was all through the years of the war. There were a lot of refugees coming and going. The house welcomed a lot of people and Leonid sat in his room, read his books, and painted.

He did paint one picture [4] from out of the window where he could see a silver birch in the setting sunlight.

After he died, my mother locked the room up. Nobody went into it and everything was just kept there as it was when he died.
There was a painting from memory of Lenin [5] on the easel [6], both of which we still have.

My mother and her sister tried to make order out of all of this material, and gradually people started looking at the pictures and being interested in an artist who was not an Englishman [posters: 7, 8] and not a familiar figure at all. But it was very difficult for my mother and her sister to renew his reputation for him. Which is why in the end we set up our charitable trust, to preserve his work and show it to the public.

In this room we have a very wide collection of works – from one of his earliest paintings, of his mother, to one from the years in Berlin [9] which is what you first see when you come into the room. It is a magnificent still life. There are also some intimate little drawings on the other walls and some formal portraits.