PBA Galleries

Graphit on paper drawing. 15x11". Striking original pencil drawing of a mature Black woman, 11 x 15 inches, signed “Werboff, Macon, Ga., 1943”. 

Michel A. [Mikhail Alexandrovitch] Werboff, born in Czarist Russian in 1896, studied at the Leningrad Academy of Fine Arts before immigrating to Paris in 1924, then to America in 1933. He then had a long and successful career as a portrait painter of the rich and famous – royalty, presidents, statesmen, generals, composers, singers, actors and poets – from the King of Sweden to Gloria Swanson and Robinson Jeffers. Admirers praised his “distinctive talent for capturing the essence of the events and the character of the people he painted”. Offered here is surely the most unusual of his subjects, an unknown aging African-American woman with extraordinary facial features which he so skillfully captured. The circumstances of his visit to Georgia during World War II are unknown.