Larisa Naumova

Larisa Ivanovna Naumova was born on 15 January 1945 in Simferopol, in Crimea. The Crimean landscape of her childhood, its sea views, southern orchards and contrasts of light and shade, remained a lifelong source of inspiration, and she described it as decisive for her development as an artist.

At the age of 15 she entered the newly organised Sevastopol art school, where she studied under Yevgeny Andreyevich Kolchenko. The Russian Academy of Arts credited him with shaping her professional discipline. She completed the school in 1961 and went on to graduate from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute in 1973.

Naumova became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1978, later the Union of Artists of Russia, and from then on lived and worked in Moscow. She took part in Moscow, national and international exhibitions, with solo shows in Moscow in 1981, 1983, 1984, 1989, 1996, 1997, 2002 to 2005, 2009 and 2015, in St Petersburg in 2009, and abroad in Poland (1985), Greece and France (1988), the United States (1987 to 1988) and Germany (1997).

In 1992 she was the official artist of the Commonwealth of Independent States at the Olympic Games in Barcelona. In 2011 she was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts in its painting department. The academy, which had awarded her a diploma of the USSR Academy of Arts in 1988 and later its Dostoinomu (To the Worthy) medal, gave her solo exhibitions at its Prechistenka halls in 2015 and in May and June 2023.

Her best-known works include Rain (1978), Portrait of the Teacher (Ye. A. Kolchenko) (1982), Self-Portrait with Outstretched Arm (1985), Figure with Apples (1992), Boy Picking Plums (1999), Nude on a Balcony (2007), Man with a Rooster (2007), the blue version of Apple Feast of the Saviour (2009), Morning of Peter (2012), Children under the Table (2013) and the series Russian Tea (2000 to 2008). Her paintings were described as parables full of mythological allusions, in which everyday details gained a symbolic and sacred dimension, and critics noted echoes of Corot, Goya, Titian, Rubens and Renoir.

Naumova kept her private life out of public view, and published sources say little about her family. The Russian Academy of Arts described her as a person of rare inner composure and strict demands on herself, who avoided showy effects and searched patiently for a painterly language able to convey the movement of the human soul. Many of the paintings shown in the academy's tribute were listed as the property of the artist's family.

Larisa Naumova died on 20 October 2026, aged 81. The Russian Academy of Arts announced her death on 21 October in a tribute titled In Memory of Larisa Ivanovna Naumova (1945-2026), and the newspaper Kultura reported it the same day. The place and cause of death were not made public.

The academy's president, Vasily Tsereteli, its presidium and its painting department expressed condolences to her family, friends and colleagues, saying that they had lost a master of rare talent and a person of great soul.

Naumova's paintings are held by the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, the Sevastopol Art Museum named after M. P. Kroshitsky, the Kuzbass Museum of Fine Arts, the Zelenogorsk museum and exhibition centre and the Museum of Modern Art in Novosibirsk, as well as private collections in Russia, Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Greece and the Netherlands. The Museum of Actual Realism in Moscow holds 26 of her works.

The academy summed up her art as a meditation on hope, light and the meaning hidden in everyday life, revealed through an unexpected turn of a subject.