Léon Bakst

He was born Leyb-Khaim Rosenberg in Grodno (now Belarus) in 1866 and adopted the pseudonym Bakst from his grandmother's family name. At twelve he won a drawing contest and decided to become a painter. He studied at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, then in Paris at the Academie Julian and under Jean-Leon Gerome. With Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois he co-founded the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) journal in 1898, which championed a synthesis of Russian and European artistic traditions.

In 1909, Diaghilev launched the Ballets Russes in Paris, and Bakst designed sets and costumes that redefined theatrical spectacle. Scheherazade (1910), with its explosion of colour drawn from Persian miniatures and Orientalist fantasy, was a sensation. L'Apres-midi d'un faune (1912) and Daphnis et Chloe (1912) followed. His designs influenced fashion (Paul Poiret credited Bakst with liberating women from corsets), interior decoration and graphic art across Europe.

He broke with Diaghilev in 1922. During a visit to Baltimore that year, he redesigned the dining room of Evergreen House in a combination of acidic yellow and Chinese red; it is believed to be the only surviving private interior he designed. He died near Paris in 1924, at fifty-eight, from a lung condition.