Nikolay Dosekin was born into the family of Vasily Dosekin, a famous Russian photographer, who owned photography workshops in Kharkov and Moscow. Two of his four children became artists: Nikolay, who took private lessons with the Kharkov artist Egor Schreider, and his younger brother Sergey, who graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1894.

Cityscapes prevailed in the work of Nikolay Dosekin, with seascapes being less common.

The artist created ‘City Street’ painting in Paris. Dosekin worked primarily as a landscape painter, adhering to realistic principles shared by the Wanderers artists. However, in France, he became interested in impressionism, and this interest influenced his style and coloring. Therefore, Dosekin’s unusual works of this period are of greatest interest to the researchers.

Dosekin painted “City Street” in a more spontaneous and lively manner compared with his earlier paintings. The artist arranged the composition of the landscape relying on the Impressionist techniques: he emphasized the fragmentation of the people and the street, and depicted the panorama from a high viewpoint. Like all Impressionists, Dosekin applied colors in thick, bold brush strokes, which is why the light is easily reflected from them, making even a cloudy day look bright.

In this way, Dosekin showed the rhythm of a big city, and created the illusion of a moving transport and walking people. By using a combination of only a few pictorial techniques, he depicted the glow of the gray sky and its reflection on the pavement. The painter added white, red and green spots shattering the classical harmony of close gray and black shades.