In a candlelit room at Sennowe Park, the Edwardian country house in Norfolk that has been home to the Temple-Richards family for over a century, a Russian-born painter worked through several evenings to the sound of Blondie. The sessions were relaxed, convivial, fuelled by conversation about traditions, the differences between countries, and life in England. The sitter was Charlie Temple-Richards – stockbroker, landowner, and direct descendant of Thomas Cook, the man who invented modern holiday travel. The painter was Evgenii Gruzdev, whom the Royal Society of Portrait Painters once labelled “One to Watch.” The result of those evenings is a single, monumental oil painting that tells us as much about the tradition of British portraiture as it does about the man who commissioned it.
The portrait of Charlie Temple-Richards is not a simple likeness. It is a narrative object, a painting that rewards the kind of sustained, forensic attention that most gallery-goers reserve for Old Masters. Gruzdev, who was born in Kurgan in the Urals in 1975 and trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, understands this better than most. His work has always sat in a peculiar, productive tension: he paints with the precision and patience of a nineteenth-century realist, yet the emotional register of his subjects feels unmistakably contemporary. In the Temple-Richards portrait, that tension becomes the painting’s engine.
A House Full of Objects
To look at the painting is to enter a room crowded with meaning. Every piece of furniture surrounding Charlie has been included for a reason. There is a painting on the wall to the left of the canvas – a landscape of the boathouse on the pond at Sennowe, a favourite corner of the estate – which does not, in fact, exist as a physical object in the room. At Charlie’s request, Gruzdev incorporated it, rendering it in the style of a nineteenth-century English landscape painter. The gesture is telling: the portrait is not a documentary record of a room but a curated autobiography, a selection of the sitter’s most cherished associations.
Then there is the chair. It is a black inlaid piece from Charlie’s childhood, its back decorated with mother-of-pearl that shimmers, in Gruzdev’s rendering, through pink, turquoise, and emerald. The ornate, curved legs of the chair are reflected in the warm, glossy floor, a detail that anchors the composition and gives the painting a sense of gravity. Chinese porcelain occupies a table. A Russian crown, embroidered with beads, appears on another surface. The objects do not merely furnish the painting; they argue for a particular kind of Englishness – cosmopolitan, heir-laden, quietly international.
“Every piece of furniture in Evgenii’s painting has meaning to Charlie,” wrote the critic Yehuda Rotenberg when the work was first exhibited. “We become curious to look into the eyes of the character, to trace the relationship of the subjects, and that’s when the documentary portrait becomes a full-fledged painting.”
The Thomas Cook Legacy
The painting gains an additional layer of significance when you understand who Charlie Temple-Richards is and where he lives. Sennowe Park, near Fakenham, was bought in 1898 by Thomas Albert Cook – the grandson of Thomas Cook, who founded the eponymous travel agency in 1841. The original Georgian house was transformed into a sweeping Edwardian country house by the Norwich architect George Skipper between 1905 and 1907. Skipper, who also designed the Royal Arcade and the Norwich Union building in the city, gave Sennowe its barrel-vaulted library, its art deco tiling, and its terraced gardens.
Today, the estate encompasses more than 8,000 acres, making Charlie Temple-Richards one of Norfolk’s largest private landowners, according to research by the Who Owns Norfolk project. The house remains in the family and is occupied by Charlie and his wife Virginia. It is not open to the public, though the couple host weddings and the occasional podcast recording. In a 2025 profile, Country Life described Sennowe as “one of the most magnificent and perfectly preserved of Britain’s great Edwardian country houses.”
The wealth that built Sennowe was travel wealth – the money made from taking the British middle classes on charabia trips to the Continent, then across the Atlantic. Thomas Cook’s company went into liquidation in 2019, but the estate, built with its early profits, endures. Gruzdev’s portrait captures this continuity: the painting is, among other things, a document of inherited wealth and the particular atmosphere it creates.
Gruzdev’s Method
Evgenii Gruzdev is not a household name, but within the world of British portraiture he is well regarded and increasingly in demand. He graduated with Full Honours from the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg and relocated to the UK, where he has built a clientele that includes aristocrats, politicians, and cultural figures. His sitters have included the Duke of Hamilton, the Duchess of Abercorn, Lord Deben (formerly John Gummer), Sir Tim Rice, and Helena Rees-Mogg, as well as the Lord Mayor of London.
His method is slow and collaborative. The initial sketches for the Temple-Richards portrait were made to the music of Blondie, in what Gruzdev has described as “a relaxed, friendly atmosphere.” The friendship between painter and sitter matters to the final work. Gruzdev does not simply reproduce a face; he constructs a mise-en-scène, a total environment in which the sitter’s personality emerges through objects, light, and posture. The sustained composition, as Rotenberg noted, is “built on a harmony of elements” that shows Gruzdev’s “realism and precise eye, his firm master hand.”
The technique owes much to the classical tradition. The painting’s protagonist appears, in Rotenberg’s formulation, “theatrical yet intimate and domestic” – a combination achieved through “various juxtapositions and changes of pose.” The silhouette is refined, the pose characteristic in its casualness. Gruzdev has developed, over several years of portrait commissions, what might be called a new standard of formal portraiture, one that draws on eighteenth-century iconography while remaining rooted in the present.
A Painting Out of Style
Among his contemporaries, Gruzdev occupies an unusual position. The Royal Society of Portrait Painters describes him as “out of style” – a compliment, meaning that his work resists easy categorisation. He combines, as the Society has noted, “different qualities in himself. He can be very kind and sensitive, share all thoughts and feelings of his model, and at the same time cognize the essence of man with a cold analyzing glance.”
This duality is visible in the Temple-Richards portrait. The warmth of the domestic setting – the glossy floors, the shimmering mother-of-pearl, the landscape painting of the boathouse – coexists with a rigorous, almost clinical attention to surface and texture. Gruzdev renders marble, gold, and silk walls with a conviction that borders on the tactile. “Looking at it, one believes and feels that it has an extraordinary breath,” Rotenberg wrote. The phrase is awkward, but the observation is not: the painting breathes.
The portrait also reflects Gruzdev’s broader project. In recent years, he has turned increasingly to what he describes as portraits of “people from all walks of life,” moving beyond the aristocratic and political commissions that first established his reputation. The Temple-Richards portrait sits at the intersection of these two impulses: it is a formal portrait of a wealthy man in a grand house, but it is also a study of a particular friendship, a particular evening, a particular set of objects that carry personal meaning.
What the Portrait Tells Us
The portrait of Charlie Temple-Richards is, finally, a painting about memory and inheritance. The boathouse on the pond, rendered in the style of a nineteenth-century landscape painter, invokes a past that the sitter clearly cherishes. The mother-of-pearl chair from childhood does the same. The Chinese porcelain and the Russian crown hint at a wider world – the world that Thomas Cook’s travel agency opened up for the British middle classes – while the warm, domestic interior insists on the particular, the local, the intimate.
Gruzdev has said that his work is “his most personal yet.” The claim is credible. In this painting, the artist has found a formula for his sitter: “a refined silhouette figure, a fixed and characteristic pose in its casualness,” as Rotenberg put it. It is a formula that requires patience, trust, and a shared understanding of what a portrait can do. The painting does not merely show us what Charlie Temple-Richards looks like. It shows us how he lives, what he values, and what he wishes to remember.
In an age when portraiture has largely retreated to digital screens and quick snapshots, Gruzdev’s method – slow, collaborative, rooted in the physical reality of oil on canvas – feels almost radical. The portrait of Charlie Temple-Richards is proof that the traditional portrait, when executed with this level of skill and intention, still has the power to tell us something that no photograph can: the story of a life, told through the objects that surround it.
