Mikhail Rundaltsov, Sunlight Streaming Through Vines on a Pergola, 1934

Signed in Latin letters at lower left

Oil on canvas

50 3/8 x 63 in. (128 x 160 cm)

Inv. no. ab_5098

Mikhail Viktorovich Rundaltsov (1871–1935) was the son of a self-taught medallist who supported his family through the sculpting of low-relief table medals and/or the engraving of desk stamps. He studied printmaking under Vasilii Mate (Матэ or Mathé, 1856 – 1917) at the Central School of Technical Drawing of Baron A. L. Stieglitz (or Shtiglits). While still in school, he published drawings in several illustrated magazines and went on to work for publishers as a book illustrator. The most prestigious among these was the Ekspeditsiia zagotovleniia gosudarstvennykh bumag which, among its many duties, produced the profusely illustrated court publications, including the albums commemorating the coronation of the emperors. He became a fashionable portraitist who created portraits of members of the Imperial family as well as members of the nobility and the wealthy merchantry.

He is best known for his portraits of Nicholas II and Grand Duke Alexey while still a child, but it is less well known that he continued his career as a portraitist of state leaders even after the 1917 Revolution. In 1917 he recorded Alexander Kerensky, Minister-Chairman of the short-lived Provisional Government. This was followed by a 1918 portrait of Vladimir Lenin.

Rundaltsov left Soviet Russia in 1920, first settling in Paris. Two years later, he made his way to the United States and settled in Miami Beach, Florida. He set up a studio in the Miami Beach Casino, where samples of his work were on display for those wealthy enough to enter. Now working under the name Michail Rundaltzoff, he quickly made connections among the wealthy and powerful. He found work immortalizing wealthy residents and even President Warren G. Harding, to whom he presented the final work in thanks for the American Relief Association’s work to aid the starving in post-war Europe, including victims of the Volga region famine in Russia. Its current whereabouts are unknown. A 1926 magazine article reported that it hung in the offices of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. It can now be seen on the cover of the August 1923 issue of The Musical Monitor.

Rundaltzoff spent his last years in Paris, where he served among the leadership of the Turgenev Society of Russian Artists (Obshchestvo russkikh khudozhnikov im. I.S. Turgeneva) in Paris.