Boris Deutsch, a figurative and expressionist painter, born from a Jewish family in Krasnogorka shtetl, Belarus then part of the Russian Empire, was educated at the Bloom Academy of Fine Arts, Riga, and completed postgraduate work in Berlin.
With the outbreak of the World War I he was drafted in Russian army with the risk of dying so his mother helped him to desert with false identity papers.
On september 11, 1924 in Los Angeles he married (Rebecca) Riva Segal (Romania, September 14, 1899 - Los Angeles, October 17, 1961)[2] Thanks to the help of Anita Delano and Stanton Macdonald-Wright he could organize his first solo exhibitions and in the following years he became a highly regarded artist also as portraitist and among his subjects, in addition to his beautiful wife, who became his muse, were Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Merle Armitage, Henry A. Wallace, Josef von Sternberg, Rexford Tugwell and Sadakichi Hartmann.
It relates the story of a young servant, played by Deutsch's wife, Riva, who is abused by her Christian masters until she falls in love with a musician and escapes.
He uses intense colours and his brushwork is typically free and highly textured with a tendency to the geometrization of forms, however he never forgot his love for Rembrandt, in particular "The Man with the Golden Helmet", and for figurative art which undoubtedly had its apogee in his mural paintings.