Alison Boulton digs beneath the city's dreaming spires

A unique contribution to Oxford is the outstanding artistic legacy of Russian Impressionist painter, Leonid Pasternak . A friend of Tolstoy and Einstein, Pasternak’s eldest child, Boris was the author of Dr Zhivago, whose work won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A painter who celebrated a close knit family life, Pasternak was forced to flee with his wife Rosalia and their two daughters, Lydia and Josephine, firstly from Stalin’s Russia in 1921 and then from Hitler’s Germany in 1938. Boris and his brother Alexander remained in the Soviet Union. While Boris’ books were banned, Alexander – a successful architect, designed Lenin’s first wooden mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square Leonid spent the last six years of his life in Oxford, and a wondrous archive of his paintings, drawings and sketches has been assembled by his grandchildren in the family house where he lived and died in 1945.

“My grandfather visited Tolstoy many times at his country estate. When Tolstoy died, he was summoned by his widow, Sonya, to draw him on his death bed at Ostapova Railway Station,” Ann Pasternak Slater, Leonid’s grand daughter told me. Illustrating Tolstoy’s last work Resurrection, much of which takes place in a prison, Pasternak was allowed the jail access which Tolstoy himself was denied. Moved by one of Pasternak’s illustrations: The Flogged Man, Tolstoy praised it, but added that he had axed the relevant passage.

A reference was quickly reinstated, the humanity of Pasternak’s drawings being too powerful to omit. Still an elegant family house, it’s possible to walk around Leonid’s studio and bedroom, gazing at works in red pencil, chalk, pastel, watercolour and oils which capture his children growing up, his wife occupied by simple domestic tasks and intense and vivid studies of famous personalities of the day, sketched from life. Einstein playing the violin, Rachmaninov at the piano, Lenin addressing an excited crowd, or Pushkin scribbling furiously with his nurse in the background, gazing away, as if unaware of her brilliant charge: all are masterfully captured in pencil, charcoal and pen.

“I’m always delighted that Leonid’s work is seen more widely. “Visitors like the fact that we still live here, and the collection is seen in a family home,” Pasternak Slater said.

Landscapes ranging from the Baltic to Palestine, still lives, enchanting sketches of children, illustrating Pasternak’s belief that “the nursery is the best exercise for one who wants to master the moving model”, Pasternak’s archive is both deeply personal – a paean to family life – and a record of turbulent times and the brilliant personalities who dazzled the age.