Serge Levitsky

Rafail Levitsky, 1890, Portrait of S.L. Levitsky, Photomechanical print, Creative Commons - Wikipedia, LL/42413

Serge Levitsky

Born: Sergei Lvovich Levitsky
Other: Sergei Levitski
Other: Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky
Other: S.L. Levitsky
Other: Sergey Levitsky
Other: Sergey Lvovich Levitzky
Other: Sergei Lewitski

Born: 1819 - Russia, Moscow
Died: 1898, 22 June - Russia, St. Petersburg
Gender: Male
Active: France / Russia / Germany / Italy
 
Russian photographer, writer and art critic. He begain taking Daguerreotypes in 1839 as soon as the process became known. After graduating from the Faculty of Law at Moscow University he started working for the Ministery of the Interior in St. Petersburg. His knowledge of photography was put to early use in 1843 when he was sent to survey the mineral waters of the Caucuses and took twenty five Daguerreotypes of Piatigorsk, Kislovodsk, Mount Meshuk and Beshtan. Five of these Daguerreotypes reached the instrument maker Charles Chevalier in Paris who exhibited two of them in his shop window. Charles Chevalier supplied equipment to both Daguerre and Fox Talbot and was well connected with the innovators in photography. This early success led Levitsky to take up photography as a career and he traveled to the leading centres of Paris, London, Vienna and Rome to improve his knowledge. The "Répertoire des Photographes de France" states that he was a Daguerreotypist in both Germany and Italy. In the 1850s he was a photographer in St. Petersburg and during the early 1860s he was in Paris with a studio at 22 Rue de Choiseul. Some of his later portrait photographs indicate that he later returned to St. Petersburg where he became the major court photographer working with his son, the artist and photographer, Rafail Levitsky in the 1890s.
 
He authored two volumes of memoirs Reminiscences of an Old Photographer (1892) and How I Became a Photographer (1896). He is buried in St. Petersburg's Smolenskoye Cemetery.

Genealogy of Serge Levitsky

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