Leo Klin was born as Shaya Movsha Gershevich into a Jewish family in Volkovysk in the Grodno province of the Russian Empire (now Belarus) on 10 March 1887. He was educated in Odessa and Saint Petersburg. Klin immigrated to London, England in the 1920s and become established as a society portraitist.
Painter and illustrator Leo Klin was born as Shaya Movsha Gershevich into a Jewish family in Volkovysk in the Grodno province of the Russian Empire (now Belarus) on 10 March 1887. From 1902 to 1907 he attended the Grekov Odessa Art School, Russian Empire (now in Odessa, Ukraine). In 1907, he moved to St. Petersburg to enrol at the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he studied under the Russian realist and Impressionist painter, Dmitry Kardovsky. Klin graduated in 1914 and, in the same year, converted to Christianity, adopting the name Lev Mikhailovich Klin. He moved to England and settled in London in the early 1920s.
Klin is predominantly known for his society portraits and still-lifes, often executed with a detailed, academic style, and he frequently worked with tempera. He became a renowned painter of London’s society women, and his portraits were regularly published in The Sketch throughout the first half of the 20th century. It was also fashionable at the time to have a portrait of one’s child painted by Klin. When Klin visited Belfast for the first time the Belfast News-Letter stated that he ‘painted the portraits of practically every leader of society in London, as well as those of many other prominent people.’ It was further noted that: ‘His studio in London is wonderfully lighted and situated in the midst of a big square where, at night one can hear the owls hoot. Mr. Klin has high ideals of art and of the beautiful, […],’ (Our Lady Correspondent, 1931, p.5). In 1928, Klin – who regularly associated with high society - had a solo exhibition in Prince Vladimir Galitzane’s Berkeley Street Studio in London, where he exhibited small-scale portraits of London’s society ladies.
Klin's still-life practice shows the influence of 17th-century Dutch Old Masters, as exemplified by his oil on canvas, A Fine Still Life, from the mid-20th century. Set within an ornate oak frame, it demonstrates Klin's skill in merging his artistic style with the Dutch Old Masters’ approach to floral themes. Klin and his ‘lovely still-lifes in tempera’ were briefly mentioned in the Jewish Chronicle review of the 1945 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, in which the then curator of the Ben Uri Gallery, German émigré, Frederick Solomonski, also showed his paintings (J.M.S, 1945, p. 7). Klin participated in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts on several occasions during the 1940s, as well as in exhibitions of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, New English Art Club (NEAC), Society of Painters in Tempera, United Society of Artists (originally the New Society of Artists), and the Chelsea Art Society. His paintings were shown in various UK locations, including Belfast, Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Stratford, and Sunderland.
In 1933, Klin applied to become a naturalised British citizen. Around this time he lived at 66 Hamilton Terrace, St John's Wood, London, NW8. Leo Klin died in London in 1967 and is buried in the St Marylebone cemetery in London. In the UK public domain, his works are in the collection of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth and the Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens in Sunderland.