French painter of Russian birth.
He was born into an aristocratic family forced into exile in 1919 as a result of the Russian Revolution. In 1922, orphaned, he and his two sisters were sent to Brussels to live with wealthy Russian expatriates. Between 1933 and 1936 he studied in Brussels, attending courses on architecture at the Académie de St Gilles and on decoration and design at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Trips to the Netherlands and France during this period aroused a lasting admiration for 17th-century Dutch painting and for the work of Matisse and Braque. In 1936 he held his first exhibition (Brussels, Gal. Dietrich), showing works in a Byzantine style that reflected his cultural heritage and also a series of watercolours resulting from his bicycle tour of Spain in the previous year. In the summer of 1936 he departed for Morocco; few paintings survive from this period, but his letters reveal his self-searching and the developing consciousness of his creative way of life. In August 1937 he met the painter Jeannine Guillou, who became his companion until her death (1946). Together they travelled to Algeria and Italy, where de Staël applied himself to studies of Italian art, returning to Paris in 1938. There he made copies after Old Master paintings in the Musée du Louvre, especially Chardin and Delacroix; in the summer months he painted landscapes in Brittany.