The artist Konstantin Andreyevich Somov (1869–1939) was born in St. Petersburg, into a noble family. The artist’s father, Andrei Ivanovich Somov, was a teacher of physics and mathematics, an art historian, a museum worker, an avid collector of paintings, and a translator. For the last 22 years of his life, he worked as a chief curator of the Hermitage.
The mother of the future artist, Nadezhda Konstantinovna, came from an old noble family of Lobanovs. She was an educated woman, a pianist, and a singer. The Somov family had three children who received musical and artistic education at home.
Konstantin Andreyevich entered the prestigious St. Petersburg Karl May school. He studied there for nine years, but before his graduation from high school, Andrei Ivanovich took his son out because he believed that he didn’t do well in natural sciences. Later, Konstantin Somov was accepted into the Imperial Academy of Arts, where in 1894 he began studying in the workshop of Ilya Efimovich Repin.
Konstantin Andreyevich painted the work “In the Park” in the year of his graduation from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. This 1897 painting resembles an ancient miniature of the 17th century. In the foreground, the artist depicted happy lovers, in the background — a fat man suffering a fiasco, trying to make a young temptress stay. Against the background of a purple-pink sky, he painted a luxurious mansion. Konstantin Somov made the painting look like a theatrical scene.
Konstantin Andreevich Somov’s manner corresponded to the aesthetics of the “Mir Iskusstva” (World of Art) magazine, which was published from 1898. The master combined the harmony of dreams with reality, his works were distinguished by the poetry and sophistication of the images.
