Artist Leonid Mikhailovich Brailovsky. Unapproved design for the 300 Years of the House of Romanov series.
He was born in Kharkov in 1871 into an Orthodox noble family. His father, Mikhail Brailovsky, was the city head; his mother came from the line of the Little Russian nobles, the Sedlyarevsky family. After completing a classical gymnasium, he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. He studied painting and architecture, specializing in landscape painting. The mentor of the future architect during these and subsequent years of study was the then still young A. N. Beketov, later a professor, academician, and leading teacher of an entire cohort of Soviet architects.
During his studies he was repeatedly awarded for academic success: in 1890 he received a small silver medal, in 1892 a large silver medal, and in 1893 a small gold medal. For the design of the imperial stables he was awarded a gold medal.
In 1894 he successfully graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg in the architecture class. Owing to his outstanding results, he became an Academy pensioner, which granted him the honorary right to travel abroad at state expense in 1895–1897—to Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Spain—highly exotic countries where he found new subjects. In a sense, they made him famous.
Brailovsky also visited France, Germany, Austria, and England, where he again produced architectural sketches and measurements that became part of his creative report on the two-year voyage. Some of his architectural watercolors, submitted as a report on the foreign trip, were acquired by the Academy of Arts Museum, the Institute of Civil Engineers, and the Russian Museum. Some of his works even entered the Byzantine Museum at the Sorbonne, which testifies to the maturity of his painting as well as to undeniable commercial success.
Abroad, Brailovsky attended the studios of R. Bompiani in Rome and the Académie R. Julien in Paris. This gave him certain connections and familiarity with some methods of Western European art.
After returning home, L. M. Brailovsky received a professorial post at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and at the same time began teaching at the Stroganov School. He also carried out stage work for the Imperial Bolshoi Theatre.
In Crimea, the Brailovskys became closely acquainted with A. P. Chekhov’s sister, Maria Pavlovna Chekhova, who, not far from them and also in Miskhor, bought herself a small dacha in order to be closer to the writer’s own White Dacha, which was located in Yalta.
After the writer’s death, in Moscow an original memorial “golbets” designed by Brailovsky—with three small domes and a cast cross with enamel and a crucifix—was made and installed on the classic’s grave. In Soviet times, the monument and the fence, also made to Brailovsky’s designs, were restored and put in proper condition by decision of the Ministry of Culture. It should be noted that the grave itself had to be moved from one place to another.
At this time the Academy of Arts commissioned Brailovsky to copy the frescoes of the Novgorod Church of the Savior on Nereditsa. His work was used by the well-known Byzantinist Millet in his book published at the Sorbonne.
In 1916 Leonid Mikhailovich Brailovsky was awarded the title of Academician of the Academy of Arts. He became the last person to receive this title during the imperial period of Russian history.
As a first step toward establishing an independent creative career no longer tied to apprenticeship, the Academy’s senior leadership proposed that he move to Moscow to fulfill a major commission: creating watercolor images of the interiors of the Yusupov Palace. Within a few months, L. M. Brailovsky produced 12 watercolors of high artistic quality, capturing in the finest detail all the luxury of the recently restored rooms of an ancient Russian residence. These watercolor albums, striking in their refined precision of detail, could already then—without any exaggeration—stand alongside similar works by his predecessors depicting the interiors of Russian palaces and mansions.
After the October Revolution, in 1919, together with his wife, the artist Rimma Nikitichna Brailovskaya (née Schmidt), he emigrated first to Latvia and later lived in Constantinople. Via Constantinople he reached Serbia, where Brailovsky served for three years as chief artist of the Royal Theatres in Belgrade.
In 1925 he moved to Rome. Under the influence of the priests A. Sipyagin and M. Nedotochin, Brailovsky was reunited with the Catholic Church. In 1932 an exhibition of 40 paintings by the Brailovskys was organized, depicting monuments of Russian religious art. This collection was presented to Pius XI. It became the basis of a collection of 100 paintings and 20 plans depicting monuments of church painting and architecture of Kiev, Novgorod, Moscow, Rostov, Suzdal, and so on. The Brailovskys’ apartment in Rome became a kind of center of Russian life. Meetings for compatriots were regularly held in the home, tea gatherings were arranged, and endless conversations among the intelligentsia took place.
He exhibited in many cities and, together with his spouse, held two solo exhibitions in Paris and the Vatican. With the participation of Princess M. Radziwill, an illustrated catalog of the exhibited paintings was published and three small albums of matching postcards were issued.
He died in 1937 in Rome.