Larissa Salmina-Haskell

Larissa Salmina-Haskell was a Russian-born art historian, curator and translator known particularly for scholarship on Italian and Russian drawings. Born in 1931, she trained at the Leningrad Academy of Fine Arts and graduated in 1954. She joined the Hermitage Museum, where she became curator of Italian drawings, and worked within the international museum world despite the restrictions of the Soviet period. She met the British art historian Francis Haskell in the early 1960s and married him in 1965.

After moving to Britain, Salmina-Haskell became closely associated with Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum while maintaining an international network of connoisseurs and scholars. She published catalogues of Russian drawings in the Ashmolean and Victoria and Albert Museum collections and contributed expertise on Venetian and Sienese art, translation and attribution. She also helped preserve Francis Haskell’s scholarly archive and later supported museum collections through gifts and bequests. Remembered by colleagues for exceptional visual knowledge and generosity, she died on 28 April 2024.

Iain Pears’ Parallel Lives is a joint biography of Larissa Salmina-Haskell and the art historian Francis Haskell. It follows Salmina from the Siege of Leningrad and work at the Hermitage to her meeting with Haskell in Venice in 1962, then traces a relationship constrained by Soviet travel controls and the Cold War. Drawing on Haskell’s diaries and Salmina’s recollections, Pears makes her career, intellectual independence and experience of crossing the Iron Curtain one half of the book’s central story rather than background to her husband’s life.