Portrait Album

Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, (born Yitzhok-Leib in 1862), was was one of the first Russian painters who labelled himself an Impressionist. He studied in Moscow and Munich and was a member of the Polenov Circle that included Valentin Serov, Isaac Levitan, Mikhail Nesterov and Konstantin Korovin. In 1889 Pasternak married the pianist Rosa Kaufman, daughter of another famous Jewish painter, Isidor Kaufman, and the same year settled in Moscow. The first born (1890) among their four children the couple had was the celebrated poet Boris Pasternak. In 1921 Leonid Pasternak travelled to Berlin for eye surgery accompanied by his wife and two daughters, leaving his sons in Russia. Subsequently, the family decided not to return to Russia, remaining in Berlin until 1938 whereupon they took refuge from the Nazis in Great Britain. Leonid Pasternak died in Oxford in 1945. (Source: Wikipedia)