Nikolai Samokish (1860-1944)

A celebrated Soviet artist who spent the 1920s and 1930s in the Crimea, Nikolai Samokish was awarded the State Stalin Prize in 1941 for The Red Army crossing the Sivash (1935, Simferopol State Art Museum, Ukraine). While he is best known for his battle scenes, acknowledging that he felt a duty to capture what he described as ‘mankind’s greatest tragedy’ (quoted in N. Lapidus, Nikolai Samokish, Moscow, 2001, p. 3), the present work depicts a dynamic troika thundering towards the viewer, the nostrils of the horses flared with excitement. It is a variation of two works painted in 1917 (one in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, the other current location unknown); each work differs from the others primarily in the colouring of the horses and the appearance of the troika’s passengers.