Nicolas de Staël

Nicolas de Staël was an abstract painter best known for his luminous landscapes using thick impasto. Born in St Petersburg in 1914, he was five years old when his family fled the Russian Revolution to Poland, where both his parents subsequently died of cancer. Rescued by a couple living in Brussels, de Staël went on to study fine arts, architecture and decorative arts at the Beaux-Arts and the Royal Academy of Belgium. He 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 the French Foreign Legion in Tunisia, where he drew maps. From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, his paintings were exhibited in London, Paris, Montevideo, New York and Washington. De Staël moved to a studio in Antibes in 1954 to live closer to Jeanne Polge, his lover, who refused to leave her marriage and family. On 16 March 1955, at the height of his fame but depressed and exhausted by the intensity of his work, de Staël took his own life, aged forty-one. He was survived by his second wife, Françoise, their three young children, and the daughter from his first marriage - his first wife, the painter Jeannine Guillou, having died during her second pregnancy.