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Soutine was born Chaim-Iche Solomonovich Sutin, in Smilavichy in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus). He was Jewish and was born the 10th child of a poor Jewish tailor in Belorussia. At age 16 he went to Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania, where a friendly doctor helped him attend the school of fine arts for three years. In 1913 he emigrated to Paris, where he met Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jacques Lipchitz, and attended the École des Beaux-Arts.

For a time, he and his friends lived at La Ruche, a residence for struggling artists in Montparnasse where he became friends with Amedeo Modigliani. Modigliani painted Soutine’s portrait several times, most famously in 1917, on a door of an apartment belonging to Léopold Zborowski, who was their art dealer. Modigliani introduced Soutine to the art dealer Leopold Zborowski, who enabled him to spend three years (1919–22) painting at Céret in the south of France. The feverish, visionary landscapes Soutine painted there marked the emergence of his mature style.

Zborowski supported Soutine through World War I, taking the struggling artist with him to Nice to escape the possible German invasion of Paris. After the war Paul Guillaume, a highly influential art dealer, began to champion Soutine’s work. In 1923, in a showing arranged by Guillaume, the prominent American collector Albert C. Barnes, bought 60 of Soutine’s paintings on the spot. Soutine, who had been virtually penniless in his years in Paris, immediately took the money, ran into the street, hailed a Paris taxi, and ordered the driver to take him to Nice, on the French Riviera, more than 400 miles away.

Soutine is most popularly associated with his studies of choirboys and cooks and his series of pageboys notably “Page Boy at Maxim’s,” 1927. Also well known are his paintings of hung poultry and carcasses of beef, which convey the colour and luminosity of putrescence. He obtained these effects by painting in as many as 40 different hues with as many brushes.

Soutine spent most of the remainder of his life in Paris. He exhibited little during his lifetime and relentlessly reworked or destroyed old canvases, but his paintings nevertheless found their way into French and American private collections and museums.

Suffering from a stomach ulcer and bleeding badly, he left a safe hiding place for Paris for emergency surgery, which failed to save his life. On 9 August 1943, Chaim Soutine died of a perforated ulcer, during the wartime German occupation. He was interred in Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

In February 2006, an oil painting of his controversial and iconic series Le Bœuf Écorché (1924) sold for a record £7.8 million ($13.8 million) to an anonymous buyer at a Christie’s auction held in London—after it was estimated to fetch £4.8 million. In February 2007, a 1921 portrait of an unidentified man with a red scarf (L’Homme au Foulard Rouge) sold for $17.2 million—a new record—at Sotheby’s London auction house. In May 2015, Le Bœuf, circa 1923, oil on canvas, achieved a record price for the artist of $28,165,000 at the Christie’s curated auction Looking forward to the past.