Georges von Swetlik was born in St Petersburg in 1912. Because of the revolution he and his family spent a number of years by the Black Sea in Southern Russia and in Constantinople. In 1923 the family arrived in Finland where von Swetlik would live and work, except for a short period spent in Sweden in the 1950s. In the beginning he painted in a realistic manner. Ilja Repin and Akseli Gallen-Kallela both offered to teach the young artist but both passed away before teaching commenced. Instead he had the support of Gösta Serlachius, a patron of the arts, who financed his travels to Paris. Early on von Swetlik became famous for his skilled portraits. The different periods in his art show an inspiration taken from various periods in art history and his oeuvre is an innovative reinterpretation of both modernistic tendencies and elements of classical art and old masters. In his most characteristic late period he worked with themes from antiquity and classical literature and created, maybe more than anyone else, an art belonging in both the Eastern and Western European artistic tradition.