Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1883 St Petersburg, Russian Empire (now Russia)

Died: 1969 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1917

Other name/s: Boris von Anrep

Biography

Painter and mosaicist Boris Anrep was born on 28 September 1883 into a Russian noble family of Baltic German descent in St Petersburg, then in the Russian Empire. He attended school in Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine) and in 1899 spent a year in England at Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, learning English. After returning to St Petersburg, he studied law at the prestigious School of Jurisprudence, while simultaneously developing a love of Byzantine art, which he travelled widely to view within Russia, the Near East and Italy; his friendship with painter Dmitry Stelletsky eventually convinced him to train as an artist himself. In 1908 he moved to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian, and afterwards, mosaic-making, renting a studio workshop in Montparnasse. He made friends with the English painter Henry Lamb, who introduced him to Augustus John and Duncan Grant, the latter subsequently introducing him to other members of the Bloomsbury Group in London. From 1910–11 he lived in Edinburgh, where he continued to study art and in 1912 Roger Fry asked Anrep to choose the works for the Russian section of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition of British, French and Russian artists at the Grafton Galleries, London. Anrep included some of his own drawings and also contributed to the catalogue introduction. In 1914 he created mosaics for the Crypt in Westminster Cathedral, although his work was interrupted by the First World War, during which he served with the Russian Imperial Guard in Galicia (then in the Austro-Hungarian empire), also collecting Russian Orthodox icons discarded during the conflict (many of which are now in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg).

Anrep returned to England in 1917 when the Bolsheviks came to power. Over the next few years, he focused on creating mosaics for private homes, mostly those of his friends and acquaintances, including for Ethel Sands' home at 15 The Vale, Chelsea (1917), a huge mantelpiece for Augustus John (now V&A) and representations of Various Moments in the Life of a Lady of Fashion (1922) for Sir William and Lady Jowitt at 35 Upper Brook Street, Mayfair (now in the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham). In 1923 he was commissioned to create the floor of the Blake Room in the Tate Gallery and illustrated The Proverbs of Hell from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794). Although from 1926 he lived and worked in Paris, his major projects were in England. In 1927 he began the mosaics for the entrance to the Bank of England (a massive undertaking which was interrupted by the Second World War and was not completed until 1946). In 1928 he created mosaics for the Greek Orthodox Church in Bayswater and for the first of the floors in the National Gallery, The Labours of Life in the West Vestibule. The following year Anrep decorated the East Vestibule with The Pleasures of Life. The third-floor mosaic was finished in 1933 and consists of The Awakening of the Muses , with Apollo, Bacchus and eight of the Nine Muses, principally represented by Anrep's Bloomsbury friends and contemporaries. He also added Greta Garbo as Melpomene (Muse of Tragedy) and an imaginary woman as Calliope (Muse of Heroic Poetry). All three of these mosaics were paid for almost entirely by Samuel Courtauld.

Anrep left Paris in 1940 and for the rest of the Second World War lived in Hampstead. During this period, he was also employed by Reuters to transcribe Russian broadcasts. After the war, he became a naturalized British citizen in 1946, but lived mainly in Paris until 1965, when he spent his final years in Hyde Park Gardens in London. In 1952 Anrep finished the last of the National Gallery floors in the North Vestibule, with The Modern Virtues depicting many of his associates in England and Russia, including Margot Fonteyn, Loretta Young, Anna Akhmatova, Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot and others. Anrep's last great work, completed when he was nearly eighty, was the mosaic for the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the Westminster Cathedral. Anrep died in London, England on 7 June 1969 and was cremated on 11 June in Golders Green cemetery.

Related books

Jane Chantal Mary Williams, 'The Mosaic Portraits of Boris Anrep, 1913-1952' (PhD Thesis, University of Reading, 2015)
Caroline Maclean, ''Splinters and Mosaics': Bloomsbury Aesthetics Reconsidered', in The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain 1900-1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 27-68
Jane Chantal Mary Williams, 'The Chelsea Mosaics of Boris Anrep (1886-1969)', The British Art Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3, Spring 2015, pp. 99-106
Olga Kaznina, 'Boris Anrep: A Russian Artist in an English interior', Journal of European Studies, No. 35 (3), 2005, pp. 339-364
Lois Oliver, Boris Anrep: The National Gallery Mosaics (London: The National Gallery Company, 2004)
Catriona Kelly, 'Anna Akhmatova and Boris Anrep: An Afterword', Irish Slavonic Studies, No. 16, 1995, pp. 1-30
Alan Warwick and Veronica Palmer (eds.), 'Who's Who in Bloomsbury' (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1987), pp. 1-2
Wendy Rosslyn, 'Boris Anrep and the Poems of Anna Akhmatova', The Modern Language Review, Vol. 74, No. 4, October 1979, pp. 884-896
Angelina Morhange, Boris Anrep: The National Gallery Mosaics (London: The National Gallery, 1979)
Boris Anrep: A Loan Exhibition (London: Edward Harvane Gallery, 1973)
Christopher Cornford, 'Heard and Seen: The Westminster Cathedral Mosaics', Blackfriars, Vol. 43, No. 502, April 1962, pp. 182-185
Rene MacColl, 'Modern Life in Mosaic: Boris Anrep at the National Gallery', The Studio, Vol. 99, 1930, pp. 128-135
Herbert Furst, 'The Boris Anrep Pavement in the National Gallery', Apollo, No. 9, 1929, pp. 158-161
Roger Fry, 'Modern Mosaic and Mr. Boris Anrep', Burlington Magazine, No. 42, 1923, pp. 272-278
Boris Anrep, 'The Russian Group', in Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition / Grafton Galleries (London: Ballantyne, 1912)

Public collections

Related organisations

Académie Julian, Paris (student)
Bloomsbury Group (member)

Selected exhibitions

Boris Anrep: A Loan Exhibition, Edward Harvane Gallery (1973)
Works by Boris von Anrep, Chenil Gallery, Chelsea, London (1913)
Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition: British, French and Russian Artists, Grafton Galleries, London (1912)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Boris Anrep]