Name Elizabeth Shoumatoff | ||
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Books FDR'S Unfinished Portrait: A Memoir Born October 6, 1888 (age 92), Kharkov, Kharkov uyezd, Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire (now Kharkiv, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine) Died November 30, 1980 (aged 92) Glen Cove, New York, United States Similar Andrey Avinoff, William Jacob Holland, George Miksch Sutton | ||
Webster tarpley on elizabeth shoumatoff
Elizabeth Shoumatoff (Russian: Елизавета Николаевна Шуматова, née Avinoff) (October 6, 1888 – November 30, 1980) was a Russian-American painter who was best known for painting the Unfinished Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Other paintings included Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson.
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Early life
Shoumatoff 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).
Career
Her 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."
Death and legacy
She 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.
