Elizabeth Shoumatoff was the Russian artist who was painting the portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt when he died in Warm Springs, Ga., April 12, 1945. She had an interesting story in her own life. Born to an aristocratic family, she had escaped from Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. When Shoumatoff arrived in the United States, she had almost nothing, but her talent for painting soon put her in contact with well-known clients. She said of coming to America, “It is quite an experience to find oneself in a new country with nothing! It is a strange sensation, a sort of lightness. It’s a great privilege to be deprived of all one’s possessions.”
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