Emily Shanks was born in Moscow in 1857 to British parents and studied at the prestigious Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Shanks first exhibited with the Peredvizhniki [The Wanderers], the Partnership for Touring Art Exhibitions, in 1891, becoming the first of two women painters to be elected as its member three years later. Shanks's family emigrated to England around 1914, where, having settled in London, she exhibited her works with the Royal Society of British Artists (1916 and 1918).
Artist Emily Shanks was born in Moscow, Russian Empire (now Russia) in 1857, one of the eight children of James Steuart Shanks, a British merchant who co-owned a highly successful store Shanks & Bolin, Magasin Anglais in the Kuznetsky Most street in Central Moscow, opposite Karl Fabergé's Moscow branch. Shanks's store sold silverware, women's clothes and accessories imported from England and the family enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. Shanks studied at the prestigious Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under prominent artists Vasily Polenov, Vladimir Makovsky and Illarion Pryanishnikov. She and her sister Mary, also an artist, befriended Polenov's daughter, as well as painter and children's book illustrator Elena Polenova, and were part of the circle that regularly gathered at the Polenov house during the 1880s. In 1890 Emily was awarded a silver medal for her painting Reading a Letter and graduated later that year with the rank of 'artist'. She first exhibited with the Peredvizhniki [The Wanderers], the Partnership for Touring Art Exhibitions (1870–1923), in 1891; her painting New Girl at School (1892) was purchased by Pavel Tretyakov and is now in the State Tretyakov Gallery collection in Moscow. In 1894 she was the first of only two women painters to be elected a member of the Wanderers group of Russian realist artists who formed a cooperative to protest against academic restrictions, for her painting The Ink Spot.
In 1914, around the time of the outbreak of the First World War, Shanks immigrated to England with her family and after settling in London, exhibited with the Royal Society of British Artists in 1916 and 1918. She continued to live and work as an artist in London until her death in 1936. Her sister and brother-in-law, Louise and Aylmer Maude, were prominent translators of Leo Tolstoy's works, who lived in England, near Chelmsford, from 1897 onwards and it is probably through them that one of Shanks's paintings, Ear Inspection in a Russian Hospital, ended up in the collection of the Chelmsford City Museum.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Emily Shanks]
Publications related to [Emily Shanks] in the Ben Uri Library