Konstantin Andreyevich Somov (Russian: Константин Андреевич Сомов; 30 November [O.S. 18 November] 1869 – 6 May 1939) was a Russian painter and draughtsman during the Modernist period, best known as co-founding member of the Mir iskusstva society. After the Russian Revolution, he eventually emigrated to Paris, along with other prominent figures in the Russian arts. In his private life, he had a longtime, younger male companion, Methodiy Lukyanov, and an ambiguous artistic and personal relationship with a young boxer, Boris Snezhkovsky, whom he painted many times. In the 21st century, his paintings have sold in the millions of dollars. In 2007, Somov's The Rainbow sold at Christie's London for GBP 3,716,000 (USD 7.44 million; equivalent to GBP 6.28 million [USD 12.6 million] in 2025), an auction record for a Russian work of art.
Konstantin Somov was born on 30 November 1869 in Saint Petersburg. He was the second son of Andrei Somov, an art historian and senior curator at the Hermitage Museum. His mother, Nadezhda Konstantinovna, came from the noble family of the Lobanovs. She was well-educated and a musician. She instilled in her children a love of theatre, music, and painting. The Somovs had a large private collection of old prints, paintings, and drawings. Young Konstantin dreamed of becoming an artist from a very young age.
While a student at the Karl May School in Saint Petersburg, Somov became close friends with Dmitry Filosofov. Alexandre Benois, also a student, later wrote that "Some kind of magic circle separated them from the others." Later, Filosofov was sent to Italy due to illness, and Somov, who had a hard time studying science, was withdrawn from the school by his father. At the age of 20, Somov entered the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he studied under Ilya Repin, from 1888 to 1897. While at the academy, he met Sergei Diaghilev and Léon Bakst.
Somov traveled to Italy in 1890 and 1894, and the two winters he spent in Paris, in 1897 and 1898, he later recalled as the happiest days of his life.
Somov's first major success came a year before graduation from the academy. Somov and Benois spent the summer of 1896 at a dacha near Oranienbaum, in the village of Martyshkino. The landscapes and sketches he created there were highly praised by critics and colleagues. That year, he also created illustrations for the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann.
In 1897, he successfully completed his studies at the academy and went to Paris to continue his education at the Académie Colarossi.
In 1898 and 1899, Somov was a founding member of Mir iskusstva (World of Art), a Russian artistic movement and magazine (edited by Sergei Diaghilev) that was a major influence on the Russians who revolutionized European art during the first decade of the 20th century. He served on the editorial board and contributed illustrations and designs.
For three years, from 1897 to 1900, he worked on his early masterpiece Lady in Blue (a portrait of Elizaveta Martynova), painted in the manner of 18th-century portraitists.
Along with landscape and portrait painting, watercolors, gouache, and graphics, Somov worked in the field of small plastic arts, creating exquisite porcelain compositions.
He had his first solo exhibition in Saint Petersburg in 1903 (162 paintings, sketches, and drawings). Also in 1903, 95 of his works were exhibited in Hamburg and Berlin. In 1906, in a group show of Russian artists organized by Diaghilev, he exhibited 32 works at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. His work was particularly appreciated in Germany, where the first monograph on him, by Oskar Bie, was published in 1907.
During the 1910s, Somov executed rococo harlequin scenes and gallant scenes, as well as illustrations for books including poems by Alexander Blok.
Somov's modern idols were the English Pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley, and James McNeill Whistler. His favorite masters of the past were French rococo artists such as Antoine Watteau, Nicolas de Largillière, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher. His favorite poet was Paul Verlaine.
"By 1910, Somov was a famous and accepted painter, and just as every household of taste had a landscape by Benois and a dress designed by Bakst, so it had a miniature by Somov [...]. By 1917, judging by the high auction prices for his work [...] Somov must have been a rich man."
The colorful, festive visions created by Somov had a darker side. The Russian poet Mikhail Kuzmin noted:Some kind of demon is constantly pushing the artist, as if a piece of a magic mirror from Andersen's fairy tale had hit him in the eye [...]. Anxiety, irony, the puppet theatricality of the world, the comedy of eroticism, the variegation of masquerade freaks, the false light of candles, the sorcery-skull hidden under rags and flowers, automatic love poses, deadness and creepiness of amiable smiles—this is the pathos of a number of Somov's works. Oh, how not cheerful is this gallant Somov! What a terrible mirror he holds up to the laughing holiday!
Alexandre Benois called Somov "one of the most delicate poets and one of the most refined masters of modern painting", even as he classified Somov's work as decadent and presciently wrote that "only with the decline of a culture do such figures appear as that of Somov [...]. In virtue of all his merits and failings Somov may count [...] upon one of the most prominent places in the history of Russian painting [...] no other artist of the beginning of the twentieth century has mirrored with greater faithfulness the peculiar charm of our super-refined epoch, which knows so much and believes so little."
From 1907 to 1919, Somov drew over 120 ink drawings, some merely suggestive, some quite explicit, for multiple editions of Le Livre de la Marquise. The book is "an anthology of eighteenth century erotic French poetry and prose, and contains 56 works by some 50 authors, including excerpts from works by Voltaire, Parny, fragments from Les Liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos and individual episodes from Casanova's Memoirs".
Among connoisseurs, Somov was given the nickname "Sodomov", to which the artist responded "The essence of everything is eroticism. Therefore art is unimaginable without an erotic basis." Commenting on one edition, the Russian academician A. A. Sidorov said that Somov "seemingly permitted himself everything from which Russian art had abstained [...] the best of today's graphic artists has genuinely surpassed himself".
The most explicit edition was published after the Russian Revolution abolished censorship in 1917, which "gave Somov the opportunity of publishing a luxurious edition of the book with bolder illustrations [...]. One of the best printing houses in St Petersburg, R. Golike & A. Vilborg & Company" produced 800 copies. "In addition, part of the run was printed in a special collectors' version with additional indecent illustrations which might even be described as pornographic."