Andrei Franzowitsch Belloli

Belloli was born on 3 December 1820 in Ronciglione, near Rome, and trained at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, though no source documents the years of his study or a formal degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg by the late 1850s, where he built a career as a portrait and figure painter, becoming known in particular for a recurring composition of a female bather.

The Imperial Academy of Arts named him an Academician for portrait painting in 1861 and a free member in 1863. In 1870, on his fiftieth birthday, he received the Order of Saint Stanislaus, second class, in recognition of his years of artistic service to Russian art.

Belloli died in 1881, reportedly by suicide. English language sources give a specific date of 9 July 1881; German and Russian language sources record only the year. Accounts of where he died conflict: one museum record and one cited Russian source point to Rome, a German source points to Saint Petersburg, and another cited Russian source points to Venice. The exact date and place of his death should be treated as unresolved pending further primary source research.

No independently verified contemporary criticism of Belloli's work, such as period exhibition reviews, has been located in the sources available for this profile. What can be documented is institutional: the Imperial Academy of Arts recognized him with the Academician title in 1861 and, in 1870, the Russian state awarded him the Order of Saint Stanislaus, second class, for his artistic service. Beyond these institutional markers, his critical standing in his own time is not established in the current record.

Belloli's market is thin and largely historical. According to MutualArt, his recorded auction prices since 2007 span from about USD 3,260 to a high of USD 275,834, achieved by After the Bath at Christie's London in 2008, a variant of the bather subject that defined his Saint Petersburg career. No higher auction result has been found in the sources reviewed for this profile. His works appear infrequently at auction, and no confirmed museum collection holdings could be verified in current sourcing, which further narrows the pool of comparable material available to private collectors.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Belloli and no gallery or estate actively manages his market today; verification of any work rests on museum provenance and auction house cataloguing rather than a foundation. Given the small number of recorded sales and the wide gap between his low and high auction results, any single sale should be treated as an individual data point rather than as evidence of a broader trend. Because parts of his biographical record, including the place of his death and any specific exhibition history, remain unresolved in the available sources, collectors should treat unsupported claims about provenance or exhibition history with particular care and confirm them independently before relying on them.