Paolo Troubetzkoy
Paolo Troubetzkoy was born in Intra on Lake Maggiore in 1866, the second son (his brother Piero was to become a portrait painter) of the Russian prince Pietro Troubetzkoy and the American singer Ada Winans. The year after his birth the family moved to the nearby village of Ghiffa, to a villa where personalities such as the painters Cremona and Ranzoni, the sculptor Grandi, the musicians Catalani and Junck, the poet and composer Arrigo Boito, were frequent visitors.
The young Paolo was attracted by the particular style of Impressionism represented by the Lombard scapigliati, which started him off on his sculptural research.
In 1884 he moved to Milan, but his artistic apprenticeship – first with Donato Barcaglia, later with Ernesto Bazzaro – lasted no longer than a few months, as he was impatient with systematic lessons, preferring to work from life, studying animals. His first exhibited sculpture was A horse, at the Brera Academy in 1886, but in the following years he also began sending portraits to exhibitions.
In the early nineties he took part in a number of competitions for monuments to national figures such as Garibaldi, Fanti, Dante, and Amedeo IV of Savoy, which were to be erected in various Italian towns; some of his works were purchased by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and the Golden Gate Museum in San Francisco.
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