Constantin Andreevich Somov was born in St. Petersburg on November 30,
1869 into the family of the senior curator at the Hermitage, artist and
art historian,
Andrei Ivanovich Somov and his
wife, Nadezhda Constantinovna, an excellent musician. The family had a
big collection of paintings, etchings, watercolors, big library; the artists
were frequent guests in the house. Constantin started to learn to play
piano, singing, and painting early.
From 1888 till 1897, he studied at the Academy of Arts, where from 1894
he took a course at
Ilya Repin’s
studio. Later he wrote that the first five years in the Academy were a
lost and fruitless time. Nevertheless he took the studies very seriously
and got a number of awards in the academy. The work with Repin can be felt
in some of his paintings of those years, e.g. portraits of
N.
Ober, wife of the sculptor Ober (1896),
Portrait
of Father (1897),
Self-Portrait
(1898).
Since his childhood Somov was a friend of Alexander Benois; during their
students’ years they often gathered together in the house of Benois, there
Somov got acquainted with
Sergei Dyagilev,
future theatre interprener, and Lev Bakst.
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