Address by Professor Catherine Whistler at the event held at The Ashmolean Museum in memory of Larissa Salmina Haskell on 29 April 2025 – honouring Larissa’s bequest to the Department of Western Art and celebrating the publication of Parallel Lives by Iain Pears.

It was through Giambattista Tiepolo that I first met Larissa.  I was working on my doctoral thesis in Venice, in about 1983, and Francis came to give a lecture – naturally it was a brilliant performance and I plucked up the courage to introduce myself to him at the end. Once he heard the word ‘Tiepolo’ he suggested meeting the following afternoon. Hence my vivid memory is of sitting in Campo Santo Stefano for an hour with Larissa and Francis, all three of us talking animatedly about Tiepolo.  No-one knew then that I would come to Oxford in 1985, working first at the Picture Gallery at Christ Church and then at the Ashmolean – and over those years, I grew to know and love Larissa and Francis.  As someone entirely new to Oxford it was fantastic for me to be included in so many invitations to dinner from the outset – Larissa was renowned for her hospitality – when all kinds of people, from young art historians to visiting VIPs, or Russian, Italian and French friends, might find themselves squashed around the laden kitchen table. 

I could speak at length about Larissa’s warmth and openness, her wicked sense of humour, her endless curiosity for stories, gossip, news from abroad, and the delight she took in encouraging talented researchers, some of whom are here this evening (Julian Brooks, Thierry Morel, Angelamaria Aceto). But I want to talk instead about Larissa as a curator and art historian.  

When she and Francis first met in Venice, Larissa was representing the Soviet Union as the curator of the Russian pavilion in the 1962 Biennale, a slightly unexpected twist in her curatorial career that gave her the opportunity over several weeks to study the art of Tiepolo, Venetian art and much else. You will read in Iain’s book the amazing tale of how this Venetian sojourn came about, and how Larissa constantly pushed against state-imposed restrictions on movement to pursue her art-historical research. It also placed Larissa firmly in a community of scholars, as she forged a lifelong friendship with Sandro Bettagno at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and met senior scholars such as Giuseppe Fiocco.  

By 1962, Larissa had been a curator at the Hermitage Museum for several years. She had been a brilliant student at the prestigious Academy of Fine Art in Leningrad, winning a three-year scholarship to work at the Hermitage with Mikhail Vasilivich Dobroklonsky (1886-1964) as her mentor; she became his ‘beloved pupil’, and a close friend, and was appointed to a permanent position there. Dobroklonsky had been involved since the 1920s in cataloguing the vast drawings collection: the already distinguished holdings of the Hermitage had grown enormously since the Revolution with the confiscation of private collections. Larissa gained a huge range of knowledge and became a superb connoisseur through looking at, and handling the drawings, and through all she learned from her colleagues.  She took up Tiepolo as a particular interest, and the artist was the subject of one of her earliest published articles in 1958, in Arte Veneta. Other articles published in Russian, German or English in the late 1950s and early 1960s range over artists including Ludovico Pozzoserrato, Guido Reni, and Marco Marcola, while her first appearance (of many) in The Burlington Magazine was in 1960, presenting previously unknown drawings by Giuseppe Petrini. 

Larissa clearly thrived at the Hermitage – Iain writes about this in his book: it was an amazingly stable institution despite the war and despite hard times politically; many of its curators were utterly devoted to the institution.  Larissa’s pride in the Hermitage was palpable, not only in her discussion of its collections in her introductory essay to the catalogue of Venetian drawings from the Hermitage, an exhibition she curated at the Fondazione Cini in 1964, but also in her later publications such as the review of an exhibition of European ivory carvings from the Hermitage for the Burlington in 1974.  There is an urgency in her writing here, where she felt this was a rare opportunity for art historians to see exceptional objects in a temporary show. And the review was also an opportunity for her to correct some errors in Western scholarship regarding Russian collectors of the decorative arts. 

Larissa’s dedication to the Hermitage was bound up with her deep friendship with Dobroklonsky, who died in 1964, and you’ll hear more on that later from Nick.  After her marriage to Francis and her move to England, Larissa remained close to that Museum – and her home in Walton Street was a welcoming place for visiting curators from many Russian museums and institutions, while she formed friendships with the next generation of scholars whose intellectual interests she shared, particularly with Irina Artimieva, who joined the Hermitage in 1982 and became Keeper of Venetian paintings there in 1985. 

In Oxford from 1967, Larissa rapidly became close to the Ashmolean: in my own work on cataloguing the Italian drawings I’ve come across a variety of references to her connoisseurship and identifications of authorship, some recorded by Hugh Macandrew, some informally retained in pencilled notes written on mounts.  Meanwhile her passion for Sienese drawings and particularly Francesco Vanni led to further publications – and Larissa took such delight in Vanni’s work that she persuaded me to raise the funds for the acquisition of a particularly beautiful drawing, which is amongst those you can look at afterwards in the gallery next door. 

But of course, the Ashmolean’s Russian collection was especially close to her heart, and she set about studying it early on – in 1970 the museum published Larissa’s catalogue of Russian drawings, of which an updated edition appeared in 1989. While this also led to her catalogue of the important Russian collection at the V&A Museum, published in 1972, Larissa was devoted to the Ashmolean and became effectively an honorary curator here.  She collaborated with Jon Whiteley on building the collection, and my memories are of Larissa working through sale catalogues in the Print Room, gleefully pointing out fakes or misattributions, and enthusiastically advocating particular lots in upcoming sales – a few of the Russian acquisitions made in those years are part of the selection nearby.  Her love for her native Leningrad – St Petersburg – shines through her research on the Ashmolean’s Talbot Collection, a marvellous and relatively little-known collection of drawings, watercolours, prints and books bequeathed in 1974 by Gwenoch David Talbot: Larissa singled out some parts of the collection in an article in the Oxford Art Journal in 1978, going on to prepare a stunning exhibition at the Ashmolean in 1990 featuring panoramic views of St Petersburg – a small sample is on view in the gallery nearby.   

Larissa’s distinctive voice in her writing is already heard in a piece devoted to a Diaghilev exhibition in the Burlington in 1969. As she provocatively noted, there had been doubts about the desirability of reviewing this show: did it, in fact, contain enough ‘pure art’ to arouse the interest of the historian of modern painting as well as of the more nostalgic theatre lover? She went on to write beautifully of Leon Bakst’s creative imagination, and of the trickiness of attributions given his many followers. In other scholarly reviews, Larissa is always fair in her judgements but will point out errors; and is always questioning, based on her strong feeling for quality, and her connoisseur’s ‘eye’.  Her frankness emerges, whether in noting the ‘barbaric’ arrangement of the Tiepolo album in the Hermitage (because an early collector had chopped up the drawings into fragments) or in underlining the true nature of Pasternak’s battles with his critics (in a Burlingtonreview, 2002). Alongside the work of Russian artists, Larissa remained keenly interested in the Italian artists and architects who spent time in 18^th-century Russia, such as Francesco Fontebasso, Giacomo Quarenghi, or Bartolomeo Tarsia to whom her last published article, in 2015, was devoted. 

As a tribute to Larissa’s scholarship and interests, we’ve made a selection of drawings and watercolours which feature works from the Russian collections that she wrote about or that she effectively acquired, as well as a few Italian drawings associated with her in different ways (and Caroline Palmer has our thanks for organizing this). But in addition, you will see some of the works of art that Larissa and Francis owned, which have come as gifts or bequests, and – wearing my Italian hat – you might like to look at the enchanting drawing by Andrea Boscoli that was thoughtfully presented by Larissa just in time for the Ashmolean’s major exhibition of Florentine drawings in 2003, as well as the superb Guercino just recently arrived from her bequest. 

For the Museum, and the Western Art Department, Larissa’s memory will always be treasured – especially in the Print Room where she spent so much of her time, and where her questioning spirit and her pursuit of quality will I hope continue to guide us. 

In addition to the special display made on this occasion of some of the drawings Larissa had catalogued as well as those she had bequeathed, visitors to the Museum could also admire the Still Life of c1908–10 by Natalia Goncharova – a painting donated by Larissa in 2022 under the Government’s Cultural Gifts Scheme in memory of Francis who had inherited the painting from his father, Arnold Haskell, the ballet critic, who was a friend of the artist.