Peterhof Palace: Merchant Staircase at the Grand Palace - Alexandre Benois

Few critics left as permanent a mark on the art of their era as Alexandre Benois, yet his deepest passion was France in the age of Louis XIV. His Versailles series of 1905-06, painted in gouache and watercolour during extended residencies near Paris, captured the melancholy grandeur of abandoned royal gardens with a precision entirely his own.

Born in 1870 in St Petersburg into a family of architects and artists, Benois was largely self-taught after a brief, dissatisfying spell as an unregistered student at the Academy of Arts. He studied law at university and educated himself through trips to Italy, Spain, and France. By the 1890s he was Russia's pre-eminent art critic, and in 1898 he co-founded the journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art) with Sergei Diaghilev, backed by Princess Tenisheva and the industrialist Savva Mamontov. The journal opposed the didactic social realism of the Peredvizhniki and insisted that Russian art engage seriously with European modernism.

As a painter, Benois worked primarily in watercolour and gouache until 1905. His Russian history series of 1907-10, commissioned by publisher Iosif Knoebel, depicted Petrine and Catherinian court life with careful archival precision; his three editions of illustrations for Pushkin's Bronze Horseman (1903, 1905, 1916-22) remain defining images of the poem. Theatre absorbed him most fully. He wrote the libretto for Stravinsky's Petrouchka (1911), designed the first Ballets Russes Paris season, and headed the Moscow Arts Theatre's art production section from 1913 to 1915.

From 1918 to 1926 he directed the Picture Gallery at the Hermitage, a formidable institutional role through years of revolutionary upheaval. He left Russia permanently in 1926, settling in Paris the following year, and spent his final decades producing more than sixty theatre and opera productions across La Scala, the Paris Opéra, and major houses in London and New York. He died in Paris in February 1960.