Dimitri BOUCHENE is a Russian painter, naturalized French in 1947. Notably a creator of sets and costumes for theater, ballet and opera, designer for haute couture, he was also a painter (watercolor, gouache and pastel) of landscapes, circus scenes and still lifes. He was born April 26, 1893 in Saint-Tropez, in the Villa of General ALLARD, and died on February 6, 1993 in Paris. Dimitri BOUCHENE comes from a family of aristocratic French Protestant origin: it is the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685 that forced his grandfather Nicolas to emigrate to Russia. Grandfather Dmitry Khristianovich (1826-1871) was an officer in St. Petersburg under Tsar Alexander II; his father Dmitry Dmitrievich was governor of Warsaw and major-general administrator of the city of Baku (viceroy of the Caucasus) under Alexander III. His older sister, Alexandra Dmitrievna (1892-1992), will be a pianist and historian of music. His great-uncle Alexander Ivanovich NELIDOV was ambassador to Paris from 1907 to 1910. Dimitri's mother tongue was French. The cure against tuberculosis followed in 1893 by Anna Mikhaltseva on the Côte d'Azur makes it that it is in Saint-Tropez that she gives birth to her son Dimitri BOUCHENE. Orphaned at the age of two (1895), Dimitri was raised in Saint Petersburg by two of his aunts of the Kuzmin-Karavayev family (one of them, Ekatherina Kuzmina-Karavayeva, was born BOUCHENE). Until 1912, Dimitri BOUCHENE, while taking evening painting classes, graduated from the Second Gymnasium in St. Petersburg. At the University, he passionately connects with the classmate Serge Rostislavovich ERNST (1894-1980) who will stay the companion of his whole life, the future art historian - he will leave monographs of Nicolas ROERICH, Alexandre BENOIS and Konstantin SOMOV. It was in 1912 that, benefiting a personal recommendation from Nicolas ROERICH to Maurice DENIS, Dimitri went to Paris where he attended the workshop of DENIS at the Ranson Academy and where he met Henri MATISSE from whom he learns to paint not what he sees, but what he feels. Dimitri returned to St. Petersburg in 1913 to study history in history and philology, and from 1915 to 1917, the drawing classes of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. Presented to Serge DIAGHILEV and Alexandre BENOIS by Nicolas ROERICH, Dimitri, whose easel painting suggests the influence of 18th-century Italian masters (notably Canaletto and Francesco Guardi), joined in 1917 the Mir Iskousstva movement ("Le monde de l 'art') whose exhibitions he will participate. During the Russian Revolution, he stays in the apartment of the painter Alexandre BENOIS - while being named thanks to him as curator of the department of precious objects (silverware, jewels and Russian porcelain in particular) at the Hermitage Museum. He stayed in this position until 1925. In view of the harassment of the Soviet authorities, he asked for leave to resume studies in Art History with Serge ERNST in France for three months. They both leave the Soviet Union via the Estonian city of Tallinn and they will never come back. In Paris in 1926, Dimitri BOUCHENE designed Anna PAVLOVA's costumes before working for haute couture houses (Lucien Lelong, Jean Patou, Nina Ricci, Lanvin) and interior design (Maison Jansen). Works on paper located in Saint-Tropez and Toulon and dated 1927 and 1928 set out a return to the region where he was born, before his great involvement in the stage costumes that began in 1930, when dated watercolors indicate also a stay in Florence. It was on February 6, 1993 that Dimitri left this world, just two months before his 100th birthday.