Elizabeth Shoumatoff
Elizabeth Nikolaevna Shoumatoff, née Avinoff, was a portrait painter who painted the Unfinished portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Other paintings of White House residents include portraits of President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson. She painted renowned American business leaders such as Richard K. Mellon of the Mellon Bank, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. of IBM, Robert W. Woodruff of Coca-Cola, Harvey Firestone, the Hunts, the Heinzes and the Duponts.
Shoumatoff painted multiple generations of prominent families such as Fricks, Whitneys, Phipps and countless others. She also painted international leaders, including William Tubman, president of Liberia, Rabindranath Tagore the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet, the grandchildren of Charlotte, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg and Anne Cox Chambers, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium.
Early life
Shoumatoff was born in Kharkov on October 6, 1888, the youngest child of an aristocratic family in what was then Imperial Russia. Her father, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Avinov was a lieutenant-general in the Imperial Russian Army.Shoumatoff's eldest sibling Nikolai, a professor of fiscal law, was the Assistant Minister of Interior Affairs in the Russian Provisional Government under Kerensky. He was the only member of the family to remain in Russia after the Russian Revolution and was executed during the Stalinist purge of 1937. Her next oldest brother Andrey Avinoff was a prominent entomologist and artist who became the Director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Elizabeth Shoumatoff emigrated to the United States just before October Revolution with her family. Her husband, Leo Shoumatoff, became the business manager of Sikorsky Aircraft Company in its early years. The family lived in Merrick, Long Island.