Igor Grabar was born in Budapest, where his father was a lawyer who worked in the Hungarian Parliament. Grabar followed in his father’s footsteps and received a law degree. Preferring a more creative path, he enrolled in Ilya Repin’s newly “reformed” Imperial Academy in 1894. He became dissatisfied with the Academy and left for Munich where he studied with Anton Azbe until 1899, with fellow student Wassily Kandinsky. In 1905 Grabar traveled to Paris where he studied with the Impressionists. His work is a wonderful refined blend of academic training combined with techniques developed by the European Impressionists with an enormous amount of sensitivity to color. Grabar contributed greatly to the advancement of Russian Impressionism.
