Lydia delectorskaya henri matisse biography

Russian model

Lydia Delectorskaya
Born	()23 June
Died	16 March () (aged&#;87)

Lydia Nikolaevna Délectorskaya (23 June , Tomsk - 16 March , Paris) was a Russian refugee and model best known for her collaboration with Henri Matisse from onwards.^[1][2][3]

Early life

Born in the Siberian city of Tomsk, the only daughter of a pediatrician, Delectorskaya was orphaned at twelve, when both parents died in successive epidemics of typhus and cholera during the Civil War.

Brought up by her aunt, they fled from the Russian Revolution of to Manchuria, China. Lydia wanted to become a medical doctor, and was accepted in the medical faculty of the Sorbonne, but the high fees charged to foreign students were out of reach and she ended up a penniless exile in Nice.^[4] The first paintings Matisse made of Lydia combined the phenomenal virtuosity that had cost him so many years to perfect with his original instinctiv