Vladimir Tretchikoff

A self-taught artist who roamed from China to Singapore to South Africa, who once rowed the Pacific for 21 days and who was interned in a wartime Japanese prison camp, Mr. Tretchikoff led a life as colorful as the vibrant blues and reds of his works. He possessed unwavering self-confidence, and it served him well. Arriving in Cape Town penniless at the end of World War II, he built a fortune painting and marketing art that was both technically superb and aimed with dead accuracy at the hearts of the middle class.

Mr. Tretchikoff was born in December 1913 in Petropavlovsk, a Siberian town now in northern Kazakhstan. His wealthy family fled to northern China after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He supplemented the family income by helping paint scenery for a Russian opera house in Harbin. Orphaned at 11, at 15 he went to Shanghai to paint portraits of the executives of a Chinese railway.

There he met and married Natalie Telpregoff, another Russian exile. She survives him, along with Ms. Mercorio, four granddaughters and five great-grandchildren.

The couple moved to Singapore, where he opened an art school, worked at The Straits Times newspaper, designed gowns and jewelry and, as World War II loomed, illustrated propaganda for the British Ministry of Information. He had art exhibitions in Singapore and won a 1939 medal from the New York Gallery of Science and Art.

As Japanese troops neared Singapore in 1941, Mr. Tretchikoff placed his family aboard a ship to South Africa and set off separately to meet them. But Japanese bombs sank his ship, and he rowed a lifeboat with other survivors for 21 days, first to Sumatra and then to Java, where he was captured and put in a Japanese prison camp.

Because of his propaganda work, the Japanese at first thought he was a spy, Ms. Mercorio said. But he was eventually paroled to Batavia (now Jakarta), where he painted portraits of Asian women. When the war ended, he went to Cape Town “with nothing but these canvases rolled up under his arm,” Ms. Mercorio said, adding, “And he never looked back.”

Mr. Tretchikoff’s prison paintings were his salvation. Published with still lifes of flowers in a book in the late 1940’s, they made him a sensation in South Africa and drew an invitation to the United States, where his Seattle exhibition rivaled another, which featured Picasso and Rothko. He also drew thousands to personal appearances in Los Angeles and San Francisco while on a tour sponsored by the Rosicrucians.