Elizabeta Zvantseva
1864–1921 · Russian painter and art instructor
Elizaveta Nikolaevna Zvantseva (1864-1921) was a Russian painter and art instructor, best known for founding in Saint Petersburg a drawing and painting school described as the most progressive art school in Russia before 1917. Born on the family estate of Tartalee near Nizhny Novgorod, she studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1885 to 1888, and then at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts until 1896, under Ilya Repin and Pavel Chistyakov. In 1897 she went to Paris, where she studied at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi.
In 1899 she returned to Moscow and opened an art school, which she closed in 1906. That same year she opened a studio in Saint Petersburg, also known as the School of Bakst and Dobuzhinsky, with Léon Bakst teaching painting and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky teaching drawing. Its students included Marc Chagall, Elena Guro and Margarita Woloschin. The school occupied a building where the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov lived, and it became a meeting place for avant-garde artists and writers. After Bakst left in 1910, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin took his place, and the school ran until April 1917.
After the October Revolution she returned to Nizhny Novgorod and later settled in Moscow, where she ran an orphanage for street children. She died in Moscow in 1921.