Alexander Anichkov was born into the nobility at Zalizen'e, Novgorod province, Russian Empire (now Russia) in 1864, graduating from St Petersburg University and the St Petersburg Conservatory, afterwards gaining acclaim as a landscape artist and exhibiting in St Petersburg and Paris. In 1923 he immigrated to England and settled in London, focusing on small-scale landscapes depicting the landscape of local Wimbledon Common. During the 1930s, he exhibited with the Bloomsbury Gallery and Prince Vladimir Galitzine's Gallery in Mayfair, London.
Painter Alexander Anichkov was born in 1864, at Zalizen'e, Novgorod province, Russian Empire (now Russia), the ancestral country seat of the noble Russian Anichkov family. Graduating from both St Petersburg University and the St Petersburg Conservatory, he received his artistic education under renowned portrait painter, Osip Braz (1873-1936). Anichkov became known predominantly as a landscape artist. He participated in the exhibitions of the New Society of Artists (1908–17) in St Petersburg, as well as the Salon d'Automne (1907) and the Salon des Indépendants (1907, 1909 and 1910) in Paris. In 1919 he took part in the First State Free Art Exhibition held at the Winter Palace in newly-Soviet Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg). In 1920–22 he lived in Borovichi, near Novgorod, close to his former ancestral home. During that time he worked for the town museum and the local library, and befriended the Russian writer Anton Chekov. As Alexander Anitchkoff he contributed the painting Winter Landscape. North of Russia to the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in 1922.
In 1923 Anichkov moved to England as part of a wider wave of White Russian immigration from Soviet Russia of members of the former Russian nobility, and settled in London. Constrained by ill health, most of his artworks, henceforward, were small-scale landscapes depicting the landscape of his local Wimbledon Common, in southwest London. He also painted Russian landscapes from memory, ‘exploring its great variety of scenery in the changing seasons with a skill which combined atmospheric truth with decorative design’ (The Times 1935, p. 16). Anichkov held his first solo exhibition at the Bloomsbury Gallery in December 1931,mostly featuring his small-scale paintings of Wimbledon Common which ‘together [...] form a delightful record of the changes of season and weather in a place that affords a remarkable variety of landscape effects, open common, birch wood, sandy gorge, and sky reflecting water’ (The Times 1931, p. 12). He exhibited his paintings of the Common and of northern Russia again at the Bloomsbury Gallery in December 1933 and June 1935. Alongside other Russian émigré artists (among them Nadia Benois and Vsevolod Sozonov), he took part in the 1931 Exhibition of the Russian Group, organised by the Tate Gallery’s Director, J. B. Manson, held at Prince Vladimir Galitzine's Gallery in Mayfair, London. Of the show, The Times art critic Charles Marriott commented: 'There is a good deal of variety in style and tendency, but there is a common bond, as Mr Manson remarks, in intimacy of feeling. One of the serious of the group is Mr Alexandre Anitchkof, whose small paintings of Wimbledon Common are encountered again with pleasure (Marriott 1931, p. 14).
Alexander Anichkov died in the French Hospital, London, England on 18 July 1935 and was buried at Barnes Cemetery. Obituaries dedicated to him were published in The Times (23 July 1935, p. 16) and in the Russian émigré publication Vozrozhdenie [Renaissance], published in Paris (25 August 1935, p. 6). No UK public UK institutions currently hold works by him.