Ivan Olinsky

Ivan Olinsky (1878-1962) was a distinguished American painter whose refined portraits and figure paintings established him as one of the most accomplished society portraitists of the early twentieth century. Born in an agricultural district of what is now Ukraine, Olinsky displayed a precocious artistic ability at a very young age. At the age of ten he was invited to join the drawing class at the university in Elizabethgrad, near Odessa, where he worked alongside students twice his age. In 1890 his family emigrated to the United States and settled in New York City, and at the age of sixteen he won admission to the National Academy of Design, where he studied under Francis Coates Jones, Edgar Melville Ward, Charles Yardley Turner, and George W. Maynard.

In 1900 a friend recommended Olinsky to John La Farge, who was looking for a young man to help correct his drawings and assist in the studio. Olinsky welcomed the opportunity to work with such an exceptional artist, one of the most versatile American figures of his era. He renewed his contract with La Farge two or three times over the following years, remaining in the older master's studio until 1908. By that point Olinsky felt that unless he found out what he could accomplish independently, he would risk losing his artistic direction altogether.

Olinsky then took his new wife on a tour of Italy and France, where he studied the Old Masters in the Louvre and painted along the canals of Venice. He returned to New York in 1910, in time to serve as a pallbearer at La Farge's funeral. Following that difficult occasion, Olinsky established a studio at Washington Square and began painting portraits of his wife and daughters. These intimate pictures drew such enthusiastic attention that Olinsky soon found himself in the portrait business, and he would build his mature reputation as a portraitist over the following decades.

Olinsky was elected to the National Academy of Design and taught there for many years, mentoring generations of American painters. His paintings are held today in significant American museum and private collections, where they remain refined examples of American portrait painting at the meeting point of the academic and Impressionist traditions.