Vladimir Tretchikoff

A long road to Cape Town

Vladimir Tretchikoff was born in 1913 in Petropavlovsk, in what is now Kazakhstan. After the Russian revolution his family fled east, to Harbin in Manchuria, and as a young man he worked as an artist in Shanghai and then Singapore. During the war his ship was sunk by the Japanese, and he ended up a prisoner on Java. Released, he spent the rest of the war in Batavia, today's Jakarta, separated from his wife and daughter, who had reached South Africa. There he met Leonora, known as Lenka, who became his lover and the model for some of his best-known paintings of the 1940s, among them The Red Jacket. In 1946 the family was reunited in Cape Town, where he would live for the rest of his life.

Chinese Girl

Tretchikoff painted exotic women, flowers, animals and dramatic scenes in a smooth, glossy, intensely coloured style. In 1952 he painted Chinese Girl, a young woman in a golden robe with a blue-green face. The sitter was Monika Sing-Lee, whom he met while she was working in her uncle's laundry in Cape Town; she later said she had never liked the green face he gave her. The original was bought from the artist in 1954 by the teenage daughter of an American businessman, while mass-produced prints of it hung in living rooms across the world.

The people's painter

Most galleries would not show him, so he took his work where the public already was. In 1961 an exhibition on the ground floor of Harrods in London drew about 205,000 visitors. He authorised prints of his paintings in huge numbers, sold cheaply in department stores and stationery shops around the world. Lost Orchid became one of the best-selling prints in Britain in the 1950s, and Lady from the Orient (1955), a portrait of Valerie Howe, the daughter of a Cape Town grocer, sold strongly there in the 1960s. Critics derided the pictures as kitsch; the public bought them in vast numbers.

How to look at a Tretchikoff

Most people know Tretchikoff from prints, not paintings: the originals went into private collections, and the curator of his 2011 retrospective said very few South Africans under fifty would ever have seen one. The prints flatten what the paintings do — the hard, polished finish, the jewel-like colour, the theatrical lighting of a single flower or face. Looking at them today also means looking at a mid-century taste for the "exotic": Chinese Girl, Zulu Maiden, Lady from the Orient — whose sitter was a Cape Town grocer's daughter in costume — painted by a European for living rooms in Britain, South Africa and America. That tension, between real skill, mass appeal and stereotype, is why he is debated rather than forgotten.

Reassessment

In 2011 the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, which had never acquired one of his works, held his first major retrospective, Tretchikoff: The People's Painter, with about eighty works traced by the Tretchikoff Foundation. In March 2013 the original Chinese Girl sold at Bonhams in London for £982,050 to the jeweller Laurence Graff, who displays it in the Cape winelands. In May 2025 Lady from the Orient set a new record, selling at Strauss & Co in Johannesburg for R31.9 million, about US$1.8 million. His life is told in his autobiography, Pigeon's Luck (1973), and in Boris Gorelik's biography Incredible Tretchikoff (2013). He died in Cape Town in 2006.

Where to see his work

Few originals hang in public museums, so the best chance to see one is a loan exhibition or a viewing before an auction. Chinese Girl is on show at Laurence Graff's estate in the Cape winelands.

See also

His contemporaries Irma Stern and J. H. Pierneef; Southern Africa; and our list of South African painters.