Painter Boris de Heroys was born in Aulie-Ata in Russian Turkestan (currently Taraz, Kazakhstan), into a Russian noble family of French descent in 1876, moving to St Petersburg at a young age where he attended the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in parallel to his military education. His illustrious military career was cut short abruptly by the 1917 October Revolution, forcing him to immigrate to England, where he became a member of the local Russian émigré community, an art educator and an artist, exhibiting regularly, including with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the New English Art Club and the Royal Society of British Artists.
Painter Boris Vladimirovich de Heroys was born on 22 March 1876 in Aulie-Ata in the Governor-Generalship of Russian Turkestan (currently the city of Taraz in Kazakhstan), into a Russian noble family of French descent. His great-grandfather arrived in St Petersburg from Paris in 1774 to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts, and both his grandfather and father were in the military. From 1886 onwards de Heroys lived in St Petersburg, where he pursued military education, first as a member of the Cadet corps, then, from 1891 onwards, of the Page Corps, and subsequently, as a student of the Nikolayev General Staff Academy (1901–04). He was selected as one of the two chamber pages to Princess Alix (Alexandra Fedorovna) at her wedding to Tsar Nicholas II in 1894. A year later he was commissioned into the elite Egersky Lifeguards Regiment. During that period, De Heroys simultaneously attended the Drawing School of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts.
In 1904–05 de Heroys took part in the Russo-Japanese War, fighting on the Manchurian front. He then served in Kiev (now Kyiv) and at the General Staff in St Petersburg. In 1912 he became a professor of military tactics at the Nikolayev General Staff Academy and was promoted to the rank of colonel. De Heroys served continuously throughout the First World War, including, from May 1917 onwards, as Chief of Staff of the 11th Army in the Southwestern Front (from July 1916 in the rank of major general), receiving a number of important orders for his services. In August 1917 de Heroys was arrested by Russia's Provisional Government for his support of General Lavr Kornilov, but was eventually released due to the lack of evidence against him. Following the events of October 1917 de Heroys refused to evacuate with the Nikolayev General Staff Academy, which was moved from St Petersburg to Kazan. In 1918, he escaped to Finland, where the rest of his family was already waiting for him. That same year he moved to England, settling in Chelsea, London, by 1920.
During the period of his migration, de Heroys was chairman of a special military mission organised to collect money for the White Russian armies of Generals Yevgeny Miller, Nikolai Yudenich, Anton Denikin and Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. De Heroys represented United Kingdom at the Congress of Russia Abroad, which took place in Paris in 1926. He also undertook some military teaching and served as a member of the Izmailov's Corps's émigré representation in Paris, contributing to the publication of their periodical, Izmailovskaia Starina [Izmailov's Antiques]. Around this time, de Heroys started painting professionally, resumeing his artistic education in London at the Chelsea School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art.
From the late 1920s onwards, de Heroys taught at the Hampstead School of Art and the Chelsea School of Art (drawing). Having separated from his first wife, in 1927 de Heroys met Dorothy Barkworth, a student of his at the Chelsea School of Art, who would later become his life partner. He participated in the exhibitions of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (1921–23), the New English Art Club (NEAC, 1927–30) and the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA, 1935). In 1931 de Heroys took part in the Exhibition of the Russian Group held at the Mayfair gallery of fellow Russian émigré, Prince Vladimir Galitzine. In 1935 de Heroys was elected a member of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He wrote art historical pieces for several British publications in the late 1920s, including Apollo, while his two-volume book of memoirs, published posthumously in 1969–70, was translated into English in 2018.
From the early 1940s for the rest of his life de Heroys lived in Paignton, near Torquay in Devon. Boris de Heroys died in Paignton, Devon, England on 28 February 1942 and was buried at the cemetery in the nearby village of Collaton St Mary. Multiple works by De Heroys are in the collection of the Torre Abbey Museum in Torquay.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Boris de Heroys]
Publications related to [Boris de Heroys] in the Ben Uri Library