Alexey Krasnovsky, who has died aged 71, spent the last quarter-century of his life in Dún Laoghaire and was one of the country's foremost painters.
A master of landscape and still life in locations from Mexico to Maine and from Tavira to Trinidad, Krasnovsky ultimately chose to settle in Ireland, where his paintings have long been admired and sought after both by public institutions and by private collectors.
Born in Russia in 1945 on the Black Sea, where his father was a naval officer and lighthouse keeper, he moved as a teenager with his family to the St Peterburg of their ancestry and, after a period of military conscription, studied art at the Tavichosky College of Art under the constructivist painter Alexander Pavlovitch Zaitev.
On leaving college, he worked as an independent artist in St Petersburg, but when he and his young ballerina wife and their two children were granted official permission to leave the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, they settled for a time in Austria.
Sociable After exhibitions in Vienna and Paris, he and his family then moved to the United States, starting their American life in New York, though Alexey soon found the rural landscape of Woodstock more congenial to his temperament and art.
After the break-up of his marriage and subsequent sojourns in Mexico, Portugal and southern France, he finally settled in Ireland in the early 1990s, living in Dún Laoghaire for the last decades of his life and constantly painting in the studio of his Clarinda Park garden flat. He was exhibited here from the outset by Ib Jorgensen, who had been recommended to him by an American friend and who deemed him to be “a painter of post-impressionist greatness”.
One-man shows of his work in the Jorgensen gallery took place every couple of years, with a retrospective planned in the coming months.
He has also been highly esteemed by other connoisseurs and collectors – not least the Office of Public Works, which acquired many of his landscapes and still lifes.
He was also regularly included in RHA exhibitions. He was a man of great learning about art, literature, music, history and politics, though his essentially intellectual nature was offset by a playful and often irrepressible sense of mischief and fun.
These sociable occasions were much to the fore in the local pub where he often relaxed after an arduous day’s work. He is survived by his sister Vera in St Petersburg and by his daughter Alexandra in New York.