Leonid Pasternak

The family claimed to be distantly descended, in one line, from Isaac Abrabanel, the 15th-century Jewish philosopher and treasurer of Portugal, although no independent evidence of this exists.

His first sponsor was the local street cleaner who began buying Pasternak's art when Leonid was seven years old.

He returned to Russia, served the compulsory two years in the Imperial Russian Army (artillery regiment) and in 1889 started a career as a full-time painter.

He soon became a popular painter, a member of the so-called Polenov circle, which included Valentin Serov, Isaac Levitan, Mikhail Nesterov, and Konstantin Korovin.

He was a friend of Leo Tolstoy, for months lived in Yasnaya Polyana, and painted many portraits of the great writer, also illustrating his novels War and Peace and Resurrection.

But my father's sketches came from the same source whence the author obtained his observations, the courtroom, the transit prison, the country, the railway.

It was the reservoir of living details, the identical realistic presentation of ideas, that saved him from the danger of digressing from the spirit of the original.

Pasternak was elected a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts (1905), and also taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

In 1924, he painted a portrait of Albert Einstein (now in the Mathematics and Computer Science Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem).