140th Anniversary of Zinaida Serebriakova's Birth

Zinaida Serebriakova is a renowned, world-famous artist from Kharkiv Oblast whose paintings you have likely seen. Her life journey was turbulent and challenging, but even after spending the last third of her life in exile, she fondly remembered her native Slobozhanshchyna, with its picturesque landscapes and proud peasant women who often served as her models.

Born in the village of Neskuchne, Zinaida wrote in her letters about the happiest years of her family and creative life in Ukraine.

Following the tumultuous period of Ukraine's struggle for statehood (1917–1923), she was widowed and began working at the archaeological museum of Karazin University. However, due to financial hardship, she was forced to emigrate.

Before her departure, Serebriakova’s art was filled with fields, harvests, estates, peasant women, self-portraits, and family depictions. In exile in France, she had to part ways with the themes of Ukrainian peasantry, shifting instead to the popular Moroccan themes of the time. Unable to paint her native landscapes from memory, she was distanced from the world she loved. Ukrainians would only rediscover her work in 1965, twenty years into her emigration, during an exhibition in Kyiv.

Zinaida Serebriakova’s life is as fascinating as her art — a true rollercoaster of highs and lows. Joy and success, loneliness and oblivion, emigration and a symbolic return home through her paintings — all were part of her story. Yet, above all, she left behind the most important thing: beauty carried through the whirlwind of an era.