Paolo Troubetzkoy

b. 1866 — d. 1938

Son of a Russian officer, of a princely family, and of the American opera singer Ada Winans, from a very young age he came into contact with artists and intellectuals, in his father's house, Villa Ada, a destination for personalities such as Grandi, Ranzoni, Cremona. Sent to Russia by his father to pursue a military career, Paolo instead returns to Italy and goes to live in Milan, where he works in the studios of Francesco Barzaghi and Ernesto Bazzaro, starting to sculpt. In 1896 he went to Russia to stay there for a few years, periodically returning to Italy; in 1898 in Moscow the Tsar appointed him professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and the following year the artist executed the equestrian monument of Alexander II in Petersburg. He made his debut exhibiting in 1900 in the Russian pavilion of the Universal Exposition in Paris; three of his sculptures are immediately purchased by the Luxembourg Museum. After some stays in Paris and the United States, in 1912 he built the Cà Bianca, in Suna, where he settled in 1932. In the meantime he continued to work and travel tirelessly: in 1913 he exhibited at the Secession in Rome; between 1925 and 1935 he frequently stays in Milan, where he paints a bronze and some drawings with the subject of his sister-in-law Amalia and his nephew Giulio. His reputation as a portraitist extends more and more, he paints the portraits of Tolstoy and Segantini, but he is also well known as an "animalist". However, he does not have much luck in the competitions for equestrian monuments banned in Italy. Refined and elegant sculptor of the great Lombard bourgeoisie and the European aristocracy, he models figurines of ladies, horses and agile greyhounds, all cast in bronze.