Nicolai Fechin 1881–1955

Raised in Kazan, Russia, Nicolai Fechin attended the Kazan Art School, and later the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Fine Arts as a student of Ilya Repin. Early exhibitions of his work attracted international attention. With the assistance of a patron in Pittsburgh, he and his family were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. In 1926, after Fechin was diagnosed with tuberculosis in New York, the family moved to Taos. There, Fechin not only recuperated but took to the rugged mountain locale, painting scenes of the region and its people in his inimitable, virtuosic hand.

“Most artists who came to Taos were Americans drawn by two subjects—the Pueblo Indians and the high desert landscape—that answered their need for distinctively national themes. Nicolai Fechin, by contrast, was won over not by the Americanness of the Southwest but by the similarity of New Mexico and its people to the topography and tribal cultures of his native Russia.”

– Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Painters and the American West