Chaim Soutine was born in January 1893 in a small Jewish shtetl near Minsk. He was the tenth of eleven children and raised by a father who was a tailor. The modest income and discrimination the family faced were typical of Russian-born Jews in this era. His Orthodox family disagreed with his interest in art, and he was beaten as punishment for showing a portrait to a rabbi. The suffering he experienced in this Jewish ghetto is thought to have impacted his later painting work.

From 1910, beginning at age 16, Chaim Soutine studied at the Vilna Academy of Fine Art in present-day Lithuania. This was one of the few academies at the time that accepted Jewsish students. Soutine developed a visually dark style and excelled at drawing and painting. He was exposed to Russian avant-garde artists and the Russian masters, furthering his art knowledge. Soutine emigrated to Paris in 1913 with friends he made at the Academy to further pursue his art career, attending the famed École des Beaux-Arts.

Soutine frequently took visits to the Louvre while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and worked in the studio of Fernand Cormon. All of this exposed him to a traditional academic style of European painting. The works of Rembrandt made a particular impact on him and he later made several trips to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, where he slept on benches outside to more closely experience Rembrandt’s oeuvre.

For a time, Chaim Soutine lived at La Ruche, the Beehive, a residence near Montparnasse for struggling artists. Here, he met Amadeo Modigliani and other artists in the École de Paris. Soutine was notoriously shy to the point of being unsociable and lived in relative bohemian misery. Further, he developed a stomach ulcer and painted frantically, filling hundreds of canvases.

Soutine ignored many of the avant garde trends of the time, using a more traditional style to paint portraits and still lifes. Food, death, and remnants of his Jewish heritage, were the central obsession of his oeuvre, repeating the usage of animal carcasses. As the First World War ended, Soutine began painting portraits of local people he met at random. In the 1920s, his most prolific era, he explored a further Expressionist style of dramatic, dark, natural scenes.

His palette is vivid, contrasted, and even violent, with tormented lines and abstracted forms, eliciting a dramatic ambiance. His works were shown and sold widely. In the 1930s, his first patron, Zborowski, died, but Soutine was supported by French collectors Madeleine and Marcellin Castaing. He participated in many exhibitions around the world through this time.

As the Second World War began, Soutine had to flee the French capital and hide due to his Jewish heritage. Stamped as a Jew, he moved from place to place seeking refuge. The anxiety and stress of this continual movement only aggravated his ulcer. Chaim Soutine faced an emergency operation to remedy the bleeding condition, but the stress of travel and operation ultimately did not save him. He died at 50 years old in 1943.

Chaim Soutine is remembered as an Expressionist amidst the avant garde movements of the time. This represents an important precedent to abstract Expressionism, and a bridge between traditional techniques and Abstract Expressionism. His thickly painted canvases and experimentation with form influenced many later artists such as Jean DuBuffet.