Constantin Westchiloff

Constantin Alexandrovich Westchiloff (born Konstantin Alexandrovich Veschilov; 1877–1945) was a Russian-American Impressionist painter.

Westchiloff was born in Russia in 1877. He Americanized his name to Constantin A. Westchiloff when he emigrated to the United States in 1935.

He studied under Ilya Repin at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1898. He won an award in 1904 for the painting, "Ivan the Terrible After the Triumph of Kazan." He held a foreign study fellowship from the Royal Academy in 1905-06. He exhibited in the Royal Academy's Fall Exhibit of 1906, showing "Breakthrough of the Cruiser Askold in 1904 in the Yellow Sea," which documented the Russo-Japanese War. In that Academy exhibit he also showed portraits of Count Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky and of Lieut. S. Poguljajeff. He was also active in theatre design at the Petrograd Technical Institute.

He emigrated from Soviet Russia in 1922, lived in Italy (1923-1928), France (1929-1935), and immigrated to the United States in 1935 and settled in New York, where he died.

Throughout his career Westchiloff painted a wide variety of subjects in the Impressionist style, but was particularly noted for his seascapes and harbor scenes. He operated a studio in New York and often painted coastal Maine scenes. What may be his largest work, "Niagara Falls" at 57-inches wide by 48-inches high, appeared at auction in London in the early 1980s and is now in a private collection in Chicago.

References

• Benezit Dictionary of Artists
• Translation from Thieme-Becker Allgemeines Lexikon Der Bildenden Kunstler, Bd 35, s 434 (1942)
• Translation of portions of the entry of Konstantin Alexandrovich Veshchilov in a Russian biographical dictionary of artists published in the 1970s