Somehow, it seems a quintessentially Santa Barbara story in the retelling: A son is born to a highly-placed Russian General in the Tsar’s Army. His education in Russia, at Oxford, and in Paris is first-class. He studies with some of the most famous painters of his day, including Joaquín Sorolla. In 1919, he immigrates to the U.S. Fabulous – some would even say incredible – adventures in the art world as a dealer and artist land him in Summerland at the age of sixty-five. He becomes deeply reclusive. There are even rumors of alcoholism. In the late sixties, he emerges as a bearded, eccentric octogenarian with an idiosyncratic – perhaps even psychedelic? – body of watercolor paintings that he exhibits at a string of California museums. A Continental character with a mysterious background who seems financially comfortable without visible means of support? That is a Santa Barbara story. And that is the broad outline of The Incredible True Story of Harvey Leepa.

Harvey Leepa’s very birth date remains a point of contention. Was he born in 1887 as his lifetime museum catalogs state, or was he born in 1892 as certain artist dictionaries report? Yet another date appears on a Naturalization document. The Gallery currently cites the contemporaneous catalogs which list his birthplace as Lepaya, Russia. Following an education in Riga, Russia and with private tudors in England, he was accepted to Oxford. He reports having been pulled out in 1905 to accompany his father to sign the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War, which was his first trip to America. He records, in fact, a trip by train through Summerland that same year. He continued on to study at Academie Julian under Jean Paul Laurens, at the École des Beaux Arts, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He had even more study under Sorolla in Spain and under Hugo Von Habermann in Munich. Following his immigration to the U.S., there is scant information on what Leepa was doing. He apparently taught at Columbia University. He reports owning galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C.