A graduate of the Odessa School of Drawing, Braz furthered his education in Munich under S. Hollósy, in the Netherlands (1893), in Paris (1894), and completed it being an auditor in Ilya Repin’s studio at the Higher Art School of the Imperial Academy of Arts (1895–1896). Soon he opened his own art school in St. Petersburg, where Zinaida Serebryakova was among his students. Braz is primarily a portrait painter, although landscapes and still-lifes can be found in his later art. The portrait of Chekhov was commissioned to the artist by Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov, who never left the desire to replenish his portrait gallery of prominent contemporaries. The first version, created in the summer of 1897 in Melikhovo, did not satisfy the author and may have been destroyed. The following spring, in Nice, the writer sat again for Braz. The fact that the portrait, for all its likeness, is somewhat dry is not surprising: Braz could not go beyond the boundaries of a traditional cabinet portrait, as he had to continue the gallery of images of poets, writers and artists painted for Tretyakov by Vasily Perov, Ivan Kramskoi, Ivan Repin. Alexandre Benois gave a high praise to this work: “To many, the portrait seemed too prosaic, mundane. I think that future generations will be especially grateful to Braz for having left an absolutely objective “document” on the writer’s appearance. No comments, no emphases come forward here, the artist with his personal opinion seems to efface himself in front of the person he was to portray.”
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow