Alfred Eberling

Wilhelm Alfred Eberling, also known as Alfred Rudolfovich Eberling (; 3 January 1872 – 17 January 1951), was a Russian painter of German descent, active in Saint Petersburg (later Leningrad) from the reign of Emperor Alexander III through the rule of Joseph Stalin. He is particularly known for his portraits.

Biography Eberling studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts 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. These institutions aside, he taught privately in his studio on ; his notable students include Vyacheslav Zagonek, Yuri Tulin, and Boris Ugarov, as well as historian Mikhail German.

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