Boris Anrep in his Studio, 65 Boulevard Arago
- Artist: Pierre Roy
- Date: 1949
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 653 x 501 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
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About this artwork
This is the *Boris Anrep in his Studio, 65 Boulevard Arago* by Pierre Roy, painted in 1949. It’s a clever imaginary portrait: Roy turns his lifelong friend, the mosaicist Boris Anrep, into a towering stone head. By skewing perspective, Roy makes the bust loom over the studio, creating a cinematic zoom that feels like a sudden dramatic focus. The studio, located on Paris’s Boulevard Arago, was shared by the two artists; Anrep moved in after leaving his wife in 1926, and the space had been Roy’s long‑term lease. Both studied together at the Académie Julian in 1908, forging a friendship that lasted a lifetime. Anrep’s background—born in St Petersburg, educated in Paris and Edinburgh, with early mosaic work in England—comes through in the textures and the sparse furniture on the canvas. Roy’s muted palette and restrained composition contrast with the imposing scale, adding a subtle tension. The painting sits within the larger context of surrealist explorations of scale, as shown in the Surrealism and Beyond and Scale exhibitions.
See it in person
Boris Anrep in his Studio, 65 Boulevard Arago is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
