Nicolas de Staël

Nicolas de Staël was a painter best known for his luminous landscapes using thick impasto. Born in St Petersburg in 1914 to an aristocratic family, he was an orphan aged eight, having moved from Poland three years earlier in the wake of the Russian Revolution, to Brussels, adopted by a Belgian couple, the Friceros. De Staël lived in France for most of his adult life, but also spent several years travelling in Morocco in the 1930s, and was mobilised in 1940 in Tunisia. From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, his paintings were exhibited in London, Paris, Montevideo, New York and Washington. He took his own life  in Antibes, aged forty-one, survived by his wife and children.