In Russia, he is associated with the Silver Age of Russian Poetry as the addressee of many beautiful poems by Anna Akhmatova, including her Tale of the Black Ring.

Anrep was also friendly with Nikolai Gumilev, an outstanding poet and Akhmatova's husband, and Nikolay Nedobrovo, a talented critic, two prominent figures of the 1910s in Saint Petersburg.

[1] The Anrep family, originally from Westphalia, belonged to Swedish and Russian nobility and numbered a few renowned army officers in the 16th to 19th centuries.

His father, Vasily Konstantinovich fon Anrep, professor of forensic medicine, occupied high positions in the ministries of education and of interior and was elected in 1907 to the Russian parliament, the Duma.

While in France Anrep had become friends with the painters Henry Lamb and Augustus John, and soon he was acquainted with English artists and intellectuals, among them Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and Virginia Woolf.

His narrative poem Fiza was read in 1913 in author's absence in St. Petersburg and gave its name to the Society of Poets, which included Anna Akhmatova, her husband Nikolay Gumilyov, and Osip Mandelstam and became the centre of Acmeism, a new trend in Russian poetry.

He described their relationship as a warm friendship, but for Akhmatova it was intensely important and inspired over 30 poems, which trace the passage of their affair from her early hopes and dreams to her bitter disappointment at their parting.

His first success was the hall of artist Ethel Sands' house in Chelsea, London: a dark turquoise blue floor with Byzantine characters (1917) and the walls, with portraits of Lytton Strachey, his companion Dora Carrington, and Virginia Woolf in male costume (1920).

[5] Another commission was the vestibule in 35, Upper Brook St Mayfair for Sir William Jowitt, showing Various Moments in the Life of a Lady of Fashion (1922).

[6] In 1926 the trustees of Saint Sophia, Bayswater commissioned Anrep to execute a major set of mosaics in the sanctuary of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral.

[7] Anrep created four colourful mosaics, which decorate the imposing staircase built by Sir John Taylor in 1887 for the entrance hall of the National Gallery.

It includes working with electric drill (Engineering), filming a zebra (Exploring), washing a pig (Farming) and studying the diplodocus in the Natural History Museum (Science).

Other pictures are Sacred Love (a family), Art, Astronomy, Letters, Mining, Commerce (a Covent Garden porter), Music (a shell and a flute), and Theatre (a contortionist).

Compromise is presented by the American actress Loretta Young, wearing a Phrygian cap as well as a crown; Curiosity is Lord Rutherford with a splitting atom; Sir Winston Churchill defies a beast in a shape of swastika (Defiance).

Edward Sackville-West playing the harpsichord (Delectation); Lady Diana Cooper as Britannia crowns Punch (Humour); the poet T. S. Eliot features in Leisure, Bertrand Russell illustrates Lucidity.

The astronomer Fred Hoyle, Augustus John and the poet Edith Sitwell and are portrayed respectively in Pursuit, Wonder and Sixth Sense (named after the poem by Gumilyov).