This week, I exceptionally asked Celestine Bohlen,  New York Times foreign correspondent and columnist, specialized in Russia, to write a portrait of this amazing Russian collector. And this is what she generously shared with us:

“At the end of the 19th century, Sergei Shchukin, heir to a Russian textile fortune, began to collect French art, hesitantly at first and later with astonishing boldness. The hugely popular exhibit, “Icons of Modern Art” now on display at the Louis Vuitton Foundation at the Bois de Boulogne, is an homage to his vision and his guts.

The Troubetskoy Palace where the collection was housed, photo  Studio of Pavel Orlov

His collection of works by Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso now on the walls of the stunning building designed by Frank Gehry (a tourist destination in its own right) are just one part of his legacy. Another, to be found in the third floor galleries, are the works by a generation of Russian avant-garde artists – Malevich, Rodchenko, Larionov and Goncharova – who were directly influenced by what they were able to see at Shchukin’s Moscow mansion in the twilight years before war and revolution.
Starting in 1908, Schchukin opened his “gallery” to the public on Sundays, by appointment. Some who came were horrified by Picasso’s “Three Women” (bought from Gertrude Stein in 1913), or the nude bodies writhing in Matisse’s “The Danse,” which hung above the mansion’s central staircase.
But Russian artists came with an open mind, and left inspired. Writing in the exhibit catalogue, Marina Lochak, director of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum, said Shchukin’s exposition of cutting-edge French art had “an immense impact – indeed a transformational influence – on Russian artistic life.’’

Shcukin married Nadja Affanassievna Mirotvorsteva in 1914 and they had a little girl Irina, on March 15, 1915

Shchukin’s own life was repeatedly interrupted by tragedy. His 17 year old son Sergei went missing in November 1905, his drowned body not found until the following spring when the Moscow river thawed. His wife Lydia died in 1907, his brother Ivan commited suicide in Paris the same year, and his son Grigori killed himself in 1910.
After the Russian revolution, Shchukin left Moscow for a life of exile in Paris, where he died in 1936, at the age of 67. His collection, expropriated by the Soviet government, was eventually divided between the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum: his role as a propagandist of modern French art (he never collected Russian art) was deliberately forgotten.
Now, Shchukin is celebrated as one of the most important collectors of his time. In fact, he was one of several Moscow merchants who at the turn of the 20th century, were to become important patrons of the arts. Two of Shchukin’s brothers were collectors, but the list also included Pavel Tretyakov, founder of what is now the Tretyakov gallery of Russian art in Moscow; Ivan Morozov, a rival of Shchukin, whose collection of modern French art is now also part of Russian state collections; and Savva Mamontov, who gathered an important circle of Russian artists at his country estate at Abramtsevo outside Moscow.
Many of them – including the Shchukins – came from Old Believer families, who belonged to a break-away Orthodox sect who were to maintain close-knit business and family ties. Shchukin’s nephew married a daughter of Pavel Tretyakov, who himself was married to a cousin of Mamontov.
Interestingly, all these men were from Moscow, and all were from the merchant class, or “kuptsi,” in Russian. “It would be no exaggeration to say that personalities like the Tretyakovs or the Shchukins could only have succeeded in Moscow, “ wrote Albert Kostenevich, a curator at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, in an essay in the exhibit’s catalogue. The elite in St. Petersburg, the tsarist capital, was too wedded to the court and to tradition to venture into the riskier world of contemporary art.
Shchukin himself at times doubted his intuition. Unveiling a painting of one of Gauguin’s nude Tahitian for the famous Russian portrait painter Valentin Serov (a member of Mamontov’s circle), he is said to have laughed, and noted with his characteristic stutter, “a m-madman painted it, and a m-madman bought it.”
Yet Shchukin, who was also known as a risk-taking businessman, was able to steel himself against prevailing public opinion. Writing to Matisse in 1906, after receiving a shipment of “The Danse,’’ he said he found the panels “interesting”, adding tentatively that he hoped to like them one day.
But he concluded on a bolder note. “I have total confidence in you,’’ he wrote Matisse. “The public is against you today, but the future is yours.” The exhibit in the Bois de Boulogne is proof that he was right.” (the catalog shows the whole collection and  is published by Gallimard, 50€)