Alexey Von Schlippe
(1915-1988)
Alexey von Schlippe was born in Moscow in 1915 into the family of a minister in the court of Czar Nicholas II. Fleeing the Russian Revolution, his family escaped to Finland in 1920 and later moved to Germany. Alexey was educated at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, and pursued his career as an artist in Germany until he departed for the United States in 1948. He lived first in Wisconsin, and then in New York before settling in Connecticut In 1954, he renounced his title as a Russian baron, and became a US citizen. He taught painting and art history at the Norwich Free Academy from 1955 to 1963, and at the Waterbury, Storrs, and Avery Point campuses of the University of Connecticut from 1963 until 1982. Von Schlippe was a prolific and innovative painter, and at his death, the von Schlippe family, who live in Germany, donated some five hundred of his works to the university, including representative paintings of a variety of subjects. These have become the core of the permanent collection of the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery, dedicated to his memory and housed in the Branford House mansion on the Avery Point campus. He died in Munich, Germany in 1988.