Alfred Eberling

Alfred Rudolfovich Eberling
Alfred Eberling in his workshop, c. 1910s
Born	3 January 1872 Zgierz, Russian Empire (present day Poland)
Died	18 January 1951 Leningrad, Soviet Union (present day Russia)
Education	Higher Art School of the Imperial Academy of Arts
Style	Realism

Alfred Rudolfovich Eberling (Russian: Альфред Рудольфович Эберлинг; 3 January 1872 – 17 January 1951) was a Russian and Soviet painter, photographer and teacher.

Biography

Eberling studied at the Petersburg Academy from 1889 to 1897. From 1896 to 1897 he was a student of Ilya Repin. In 1891 he was awarded a small silver medal for a sketch from life. In 1898 he traveled to Constantinople to work on church paintings. In 1899 he received the title of artist for his paintings "Turkish Cemetery" and "Prima Vera". He then became a student of Franz von Lenbach in Munich.

In 1904, Eberling began a teaching career that would last for several years. From 1904 to 1917, he taught at the drawing school of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. During this period he produced about a hundred portraits, mainly of representatives of the world of theater. In 1910, he illustrated Mikhail Lermontov's poem Demon. After the October Revolution of 1917, in 1918, he participated in the creation of the Technical and Artistic School of Drawing, where he taught until 1933. In 1925-1930, he directed the art workshop of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia in Leningrad. In 1934, at the invitation of Isaak Brodsky, he took the place of the professor of painting, drawing and composition at the Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he worked until 1937. At the same time, until 1940, he taught at the art studio of the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers and at the House of Science.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, on commission from Goznak, Eberling created portraits of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Mikhail Kalinin, to enable them to be reproduced in large print runs. In 1924, he won the competition announced by Goznak for the best portrait of Lenin, and then created the drawings needed to print banknotes that appeared in 1937. In the post-war years, Eberling's drawing was used as a watermark on Soviet banknotes issued between 1947 and 1957.

Selected works

• 
  Portrait of Irina Maximovich
• 
  Illustrasion of princess Tamara from the Demon
• 
  Portrait of Lenin on a banknote
• 
  Aviation poster