Nicolas Alexandrovitch Tarkhoff (Tarkoff) was a Russian-born Impressionist. Born in Moscow on January 20, 1871 to a merchant family he studied painting and drawing. Tarkhoff was known as the “Moscow Parisian,” because he spent so much of his life in France -- from 1898 until his death in 1930.

A member of the World of Art and the Union of Russian Artists, Tarkhoff began drawing at the age of twenty-four. After an unsuccessful attempt to enroll at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, he studied under Konstantin Korovin. At the age of twenty-eight, Tarkhoff made his first visit to Paris, where he studied drawing and began actively working and exhibiting. He moved there permanently in 1899.

In 1906, he held a one-man show at the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, the famous Parisian art dealer who championed all the leading French Impressionists. Sergei Makovsky, Alexander Benois and Kazimir Malevich all wrote about Tarkhoff’s oeuvre.