Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin
Date of birth: 27 May 1854
Place of birth: Moscow
Date of death: 10 January 1936
Place of death: Paris
Category: businessman, collector
Identity:
He was one of the ten children of Ivan Vassilievitch Shchukin, a Moscow merchant, and his wife Ekaterina Shchukin, née Botkin. I.V. Shchukin & Sons Trading Company became one of the largest manufacturing and wholesale companies in Russia. Several members of the family were collectors, including his brother Dimitri Shchukin whose Old Masters paintings entered the Pushkin Museum. Schchukin collected mainly Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works.
Life:
Schchukin was buying paintings in Paris from 1897 on. His collection was nationalised by Lenin in 1918, and the paintings were transferred to the First Museum of Modern Western Art, Moscow, and later to the State Hermitage, St Petersburg in 1931.
The Shchukin collection included three Whistler paintings: The Sea Coast y274, Orange Woman y310 and The Blue Sea y380, which were bought in Paris before being taken to Moscow.
Bibliography:
Young, Andrew McLaren, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer, and Hamish Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, New Haven and London, 1980 .
Andreeva, Galina, and Margaret F. MacDonald, Whistler and Russia, State Tretyakow Gallery, Moscow, 2006.
