Notes

During World War II, Tretchikoff and his family were living in Singapore. They were evacuated, separately, as the Japanese forces advanced. His wife Natalie and daughter Mimi reached Cape Town safely, but the ship Tretchikoff was on was bombed by the Japanese and he and the other survivors became prisoners of war on the island of Java. After being released on parole, Tretchikoff lived out the rest of the war in the capital city, Jakarta, were he met his most famous muse, Leonora Moltema, whom he called ‘Lenka’, the Russian diminutive of ‘Lena’. The daughter of a Balinese woman and a Dutch man, Leonora became Tretchikoff’s lover and sat for some of his best-known works of the 1940s, including the iconic portrait The Red Jacket which was sold in London in 2012 for a record sum. Leonora encouraged him to continue painting throughout the war so that he could hold an exhibition when the conflict was over. As a result, he was able to hold a successful exhibition not long after he was reunited with his family in Cape Town in 1946. Leonora also had something to remember him by. For the rest of her life, his painting of Javanese red cannas (Canna indica) adorned her living-room wall, as can be seen in the Yvonne du Toit documentary Tretchikoff Unlimited (2012). Working with British war crimes investigators after the war, Leonora was involved in identifying and tracking down Japanese war criminals among the 700 000 surrendered military personnel in Southeast Asia. According to Leonora’s obituary in The Times of London, by the autumn of 1946 she was the head of the central war crimes registry in Singapore. Leonora married Theo Schmidt and they moved to Hilversum in the Netherlands in 1954 where they worked together in the pharmaceutical company they founded. Tretchikoff became all that Leonora hoped he would, and more: one of the most commercially successful painters of the twentieth century. He and Leonora met up a few times over the years in Switzerland or in London and the last time they saw each other was in Cape Town in the 1990s, when Yvonne du Toit arranged a visit. Leonora, Tretchikoff’s Indonesian muse survived him by seven years. She passed away in 2013, at the age of ninety-nine.
Boris Gorelik

Provenance

Estate Leonora (Lenka) Moltema-Schmidt.