Rzhevskaya Antonina Leonardovna

Russian artist, one of two female painters accepted into the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions. Antonina Leonardovna Rzhevskaya (née Popova) was born in the village of Shalepniki, Tver province into a poor noble family of landowners in Zubtsovsky district. After the death of her father, Rzhevskaya’s mother and three children moved to Tver, where Antonina entered the Mariinsky Women’s Gymnasium, and after moving to Moscow, to the Moscow Fifth Gymnasium. Since 1880, as a volunteer, she studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under the guidance of V. E. Makovsky. At the same time, she took private lessons from the painter N. A. Martynov. She began exhibiting at various art exhibitions in 1890. Since 1897, exhibitor of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions. In 1899, Rzhevskaya was accepted as a member of the Partnership and became the second and last woman painter accepted into the Partnership. Subsequently, she left the Partnership due to disagreement with their program. At the beginning of the First World War, he moved to Tarusa to live with his son-in-law, later the famous sculptor and animal artist V. A. Vatagin, who built a house in Tarusa according to his own design, after traveling around India. Since 1920, together with another outstanding Itinerant artist N.A. Kasatkin, who organized an art educational studio for children seriously ill with bone tuberculosis, she worked at the Zakharyino sanatorium in the village of Kurkino. She died in 1934 and was buried in the famous city cemetery in Tarusa.