Leonid Maksimovich Tomiloff was born in Siberia into the family of a wealthy merchant. He received his education at the prestigious Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (where Nikolai Vasilieff also studied), and his special field was “decorator”. After his studies, he taught drawing in secondary school for a while, but soon left this activity, as he preferred working at the theater. Until the revolution and the civil war, Tomiloff distinguished himself at the Bolshoi Moscow Imperial Theater under the leadership of Konstantin Korovin and Leonid Brailovsky. He fought in the war, where he received two serious injuries; one to his head and one to his leg. Nevertheless, Tomiloff came back from the war with the rank of captain and continued to work in the speciality he once trained in, only now in Istanbul, where he was forced to flee to. Like many other Russian-speaking artists (Vladimir Bobritsky, Nikolai Kalmykoff, Nikolai Peroff and others), in the first years of his émigré life, Tomiloff did a lot of work at the Theatre des Petits Champs (as well as at other small émigré theater associations), creating various sets for performances. According to contemporary journalists, his scenery contributed almost 50% of the success. They wrote: “Which of the Russians, one way or another involved in the theater, did not know L.M. Tomiloff? It is difficult to find such a person not only among the actors, but also among the public, even a foreign one” (Turskiy 1927, n.p.). Subsequently, Tomiloff's talent was appreciated by the regulars of the Constantinople Commercial Club, where he worked as chief decorator throughout the existence of this entertainment establishment. There is every reason to believe that, after the closure of the club, he worked in Ankara. Unfortunately however, there is no information about how his life ended. Interestingly, the details of the artist's life were published in several Istanbul newspapers because of rumors about his death that circulated around the city. Nevertheless, the obituaries created by the journalists turned out to be premature.