Nadja Stember, wife of the artist

Nadejda Georgievsky Stember, wife of the artist, was born on October 31, 1861 in Nicopol, Ukraine on her parents estate. The family kept her birthday on October 31, its date in the Old Style calendar Russia used until 1918, and the New York Russian press gave it as November 13 in the modern calendar when it marked her 90th birthday in 1951.  She had three sisters, Anya, Vera and Sonya and her parents were Sophie Apukhtin and Dmitri Georgievsky.  Her Grandmother Anna Pavlovna Apukhtin lived in Moscow and Nadia and her sisters spent many summers there.

Nadia's education was from personal tutors until she entered the Classical Fisher Gymnasium (College) in St. Petersburg and concentrated on Opera singing.  She was quite accomplished and after singing the main character role of Susanna in Mozart's Figaro in the Bolshoi theatre, she was convinced by a friend to move to Paris to study with an acclaimed voice coach, Pauline Viardot-Garsia.

Arriving in Paris in 1886, Nadia stayed in a boarding house on Rue Victor Hugo with other Russian young people, studying or starting their careers.  She met her future husband, Victor Karlovich Stember on her first day at the boarding house in which Victor also lived.  He invited Nadia to come with him to where he was working on painting a landscape on Boi-de-Boulogne (a park) and their love blossomed from there and culminated in their wedding in Nice, France in 1888.

Nadia was greatly acclaimed for her beautiful Operatic voice and style but had a difficult decision to make.  Marry Victor and support his career or not marry and pursue her own Operatic career.  In Nadia's diary, she writes of the anguish this decision caused her and how she was convinced by the artist Alexei Bogolyubov, the marine painter who looked after the young Russian artists in Paris, that her beautiful singing was enjoyed and treasured while she was singing but Victors paintings would endure for generations.  She made her decision and stated that she never regretted her decision.

This painting was the last oil paintings done of her by Victor although two pencil sketches were done during the Russian Revolution when Nadia was in her 50's.  (Number 84 and 87).  Nadia is also painted as a young woman in painting # 94,   the model in # 6 nude sitting on a stool and in #156 as the back of a nude.  According to her daughter Natalie, this painting was painted of her mother while she was pregnant with Natalie, probably accounting for the painting to be of her back.

Pauline Viardot's own letters to Nadia, written in French between February 2 and June 26, 1888, survive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow.

In 1904 the sculptor Anna Golubkina made a portrait bust of Nadia in tinted plaster, now in the State Tretyakov Gallery. The museum describes her as the hostess of one of Moscow's artistic circles and a coloratura soprano who had studied with Viardot. During the First World War she volunteered as a nurse (see photo #26), and the Tretyakov's text adds that she ran a hospital and cared for refugee children.

Nadia lived in New York from 1939, teaching Russian song and folk dance to children, and the Russian community there called her "Babushka." She died in New York on June 26, 1959.