Obituary: Svetoslav Roerich

Svetoslav Roerich, painter, born St Petersburg 1904, married 1945 Devika Rani, died Bangalore 30 January 1993.

SVETOSLAV ROERICH, the internationally renowned Russian painter who made India his home for six decades, was known for his Himalayan landscapes and sensuous portraits which hang in museums and art galleries across Europe and the United States.

Eschewing what he considered the patronising tone of European art, Roerich identified with Oriental ideals and mystics in his paintings. Considered a 'romanticist' by critics, he made his cultural home in the Himalayas and the mountainous Kulu valley, where he lived and painted 'like a seer and a poet'. Roerich was greatly influenced by his father, Nicholas, the painter (he created the sets for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe in Paris, including those for Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring), explorer, Indologist, archaeologist and philosopher, and to an extent, overshadowed by his father's achievements during his lifetime. But after Nicholas's death in 1947, Svetoslav came into his own artistically.

He was born in St Petersburg in 1904 into a family of Russian noblemen, one of whom was head of the Knights Templar in the mid- 13th century. After schooling in Russia and Sweden, Roerich went to London in 1918 to study art for two years. He then joined Columbia University, in New York City, for an extended art course but ended up graduating from the School of Architecture at Harvard. He held his first one-man exhibition of landscapes in America at the age of 18 and three years later was awarded the medal of the Sesquicentennial Exposition at Philadelphia for an Oriental composition. Portraits of his father exhibited at Venice in 1930 and New York in 1932 won critical acclaim.

In 1923 he moved to India with his father. Initially the Roerichs lived in Darjeeling, east India, at the foothills of the Himalayas, from where the world's highest peaks, including Mount Everest, are clearly visible. But a few years later they moved to the Kulu valley in north India, close to Simla, the summer capital of British India. Here father and son painted furiously, producing exquisite canvases embodying the spiritual history and legends of the brooding, snow-capped peaks.

Svetoslav Roerich's first exhibition of landscapes and portraits in India was in 1936 at Lucknow, in north India, then a culturally vibrant city. By the end of the decade he was being acclaimed as an artist 'never ensnared by art's exchange values and one whose identity with Oriental ideals was complete'.

In 1945 Roerich married Devika Rani, the exquisitely beautiful great-niece of the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. They moved to Tataguni, a 470-acre estate outside the south Indian city of Bangalore. Here the Roerichs became the hub of all cultural and intellectual activity, ecologically preserving the wooded estate and opening a museum with priceless paintings and objets d'art.

But three years ago the ailing Roerichs retreated from their estate and friends into a hotel in Bangalore, becoming obsessively reclusive. Assuming the Roerichs were not compos mentis, the state government tried to pass an ordinance acquiring their priceless property. But Svetoslav Roerich fought back through the media, threatened to return to Russia, and turned the estate into a trust with 15 eminent trustees, including Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation.

A strikingly handsome man with a flowing white beard and powerful physique, Roerich was disarmingly charming and a friend to several world leaders.