We are actively seeking paintings by Ivan Fedorovich Choultsé for inclusion in his upcoming catalogue raisonné. Please contact us at info@odonwagnergallery.com or 416 962 0438.

Choultse was a landscape painter, born in Petrograd, Russia in 1877. He studied painting with Constantin Krighitsky and became the court painter to Czar Nicholas II. After the Russian Revolution, he immigrated to Paris and in 1923 began exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Francais. Although Choultse continued to paint Russian scenes whilst in Paris, he also undertook several trips to Switzerland’s Engadine. He was fascinated with the mountainous landscape of the area surrounding St. Moritz, especially in the winter.

Critics wrote that no other artist was ever as adept at transferring the texture of settled snow to canvas. In his 1979 biography Memoirs of an Art Dealer, Toronto art dealer G. Blair Laing wrote:

He painted spectacular snow scenes in which the light seems to come from behind the canvas and glow. The critics scorned these pictures as photographic and called them non-art – but today this style of painting is called “magic-realism” and is much admired by critics and museum people. When I was at university I saw a small exhibition of his work at Eaton’s and marveled at the technical competence of the artist, but my professor of aesthetics warned me the pictures were bogus and would be forgotten in a few years. Today they are more expensive than ever.

In addition to Iw.F.Choultse the artist occasionally signed his name with one of the following: Ivan Federovich Choultse; Ivan Fedorovich Choultsé; Iwan F. Choultsé; Iwan Schultze; Ivan Fedorovič Šul’tce, Iwan Federovitsch Schultze

Early works by the artist can be signed in Cyrillic as ИִФִЩультце or ИванִФедорович Шультце.

Odon Wagner Gallery, Toronto, Canada