Boris Anrep

Abstract

British awareness of Russia and of its cultural heritage was greatly increased in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the next. Many of the leading lights in English literary and artistic circles register in their correspondence and diaries and, indeed, at times also in their creative work their encounters with Russian culture and with many of its contemporary exponents who visited England during these years. This article is devoted to the impact made by the artist Boris Anrep, famed above all for his mosaics in the National Gallery. The first part of the study charts Anrep’s biography in some detail and the impact he made on the Bloomsbury and Garsington sets in particular. The second part examines the relationship between Anrep and the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and the corpus of poems inspired by Anrep. In the extensive final section, the real-life encounters between Anrep and Aldous Huxley at Garsington form a prelude to a detailed analysis of Huxley’s first novel Crome Yellow, in which Anrep provided the prototype for the painter Gombauld.