Sofiya Nalepinska-Boychuk

Sofiya Oleksandrivna Nalepinska-Boychuk (30 July 1884 – 11 December 1937) was a Polish-born Ukrainian artist, now largely known for her woodcuts.

Biography She was born in Poland. Her father was a railway engineer and her mother was a pianist. In 1890, her father was transferred to St.Petersburg and she received her first art lessons from the Polish painter, Jan Ciągliński. Later, she took private lessons in Munich, from the Hungarian painter, Simon Hollósy. While there, she met the Ukrainian artist, Mykhailo Boychuk. After a tour of Italy with him and a friend, she returned to Galicia and became involved in the local art community.

She did, however, maintain contact with Boychuk and, in 1917, they were married in Kyiv. She learned Ukrainian and assimilated the culture quickly. They had a son in 1918. From 1919 to 1922, she worked at an art school in Mirgorod, then became head of the xylography workshop at the Kyiv Institute of Plastic Arts (after 1924, the Kyiv Art Institute, now the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture). She was there until 1929.

Much of her work was in the form of wood engravings for book illustrations, including works by Taras Shevchenko, Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak and . During the Ukrainian War of Independence, she created designs for paper money and government securities. They were exhibited in 1932, but were never used.