Nikolai Samokish, A Carriage and a Droshky, 1885

Signed in Cyrillic and dated at lower left

Pen and ink on paper

7 5/8 x 12 3/4 in. (19.5 x 32.5 cm)

Inv. no. ab_10615

Nikolai Semyonovich Samokish (1860-1944) was an equestrian and battle painter as well as an illustrator who, over his long artistic career, managed to secure important commissions from both the Russian Imperial court and the Soviet government. He is perhaps the only artist who supplied illustrations for the official coronation album of Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna who would go on to win a Stalin Prize. The latter was a Stalin Prize Second Class awarded in 1941 for the painting “The Red Army Crossing the Sivash” (1935, Simferopol Art Museum). The Stalin Prize “was conceived in 1939 to coincide with the sixtieth birthday of its namesake as a Soviet alternative to the Nobel Prize. The award was first presented in 1941, and by the time the process was discontinued in 1953, almost one thousand Stalin Prizes had been awarded in the fields of art and culture.”1 There were three classes of the award and each carried with it a substantial sum of money: 100,000, 50,000, or 25,000 rubles respectively.

This drawing made during his last year at the Imperial Academy of Arts seems designed to highlight the contrasts of life in what appears to be St. Petersburg, the city in which he was studying. (The dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and one of the elegant metal railings separating the city’s many rivers and canals from the sidewalk are visible in the background.) From the left a large and impressive closed carriage pulled by two energetic matched white horses and driven by a man in a tall, formal top hat moves into the foreground. It will soon block the path of an old-fashioned droshky pulled by a single, tired horse and driven by a traditional Russian kucher (coachman) wearing his distinctive hat and belted caftan. Samokish quickly established himself as a graphic artist as well as a painter and it is possible that this image was intended to illustrate a book, essay, or a story in an illustrated magazine.

1. Oliver Johnson, “The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?” Slavic Review vol. 70, no. 4 (Winter 2011), 821-822.