Alexander Nikolaevich Samokhvalov

Samokhvalov was born on 21 August 1894 in Bezhetsk, in the Tver Governorate of the Russian Empire. After finishing secondary school there in 1912, he traveled to St. Petersburg to prepare for the Academy of Arts at the private art school of Ilya Mashkov and Petr Konchalovsky. In 1914 he enrolled in the architecture department of the Higher Art School of the Imperial Academy of Arts, studying under Vasily Beliaev, Hugo Zaleman, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, and Vasily Shukhayev. His studies were interrupted in 1918, when he returned to Bezhetsk and worked on festive designs connected to the October Revolution.

He returned to Petrograd in 1919 and shifted from architecture into the painting department, entering the workshop of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. He graduated in 1923 from what is variously described in the literature as Petrograd VKHUTEIN or VKhUTEMAS, the reformed successor to the old Imperial Academy.

Samokhvalov went on to become one of the principal figures of the Leningrad school, known for genre scenes, portraits, Soviet civic subjects, and poster design, work that included a poster awarded a Gold Medal at the 1925 Paris International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. His monumental painting "The Physical Culture of USSR" and his illustrations for Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's "The History of a Town" each won a Grand Prix at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, and his painting "Girl in a T-shirt" won a Gold Medal at the same exposition. In 1967 he received the Order of Lenin for his contribution to Soviet art and held the title Honored Arts Worker of the RSFSR. He died in Leningrad on 20 August 1971, one day before his seventy-seventh birthday.

English-language critical writing on Samokhvalov is sparse relative to his standing inside Russia. He is consistently described in museum and reference sources as one of the founders and leading representatives of the Leningrad school of painting, prized for genre and portrait work and for civic subjects tied to Soviet physical culture and labor. His continued institutional standing is visible in a 2014 retrospective at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and in a 2018 to 2019 exhibition of his work at the Russian Museum's branch in Malaga, Spain. No verbatim, attributable critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed from the available sources, so none is reproduced here.

Public auction data for Samokhvalov is limited and concentrated in Russian and Soviet art specialist sales at houses such as Sotheby's and MacDougall's. The highest price identified across market-data aggregators is USD 578,454 (reported as GBP 361,250) for the painting "The Field Workers A. Fedorova and A. Egorova," which MutualArt records as sold at Sotheby's London in 2012; the exact calendar date of that sale could not be confirmed against a primary auction-house catalogue, so it is treated here as reported rather than fully verified. No later sale exceeding this figure has been identified as of this profile's data-as-of date.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Samokhvalov, and no current commercial gallery or estate representation could be confirmed as of this profile's research date; his major holdings sit instead with the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, and the National Gallery of Art, among other institutions. His market is thin and irregular, with most lots trading well under the artist's reported auction high, so any single result, including the widely cited GBP 361,250 record, should be weighed against a small and inconsistently documented sales history rather than treated as a stable price floor. Collectors should expect to lean on museum-linked provenance and exhibition history, rather than a dedicated authentication body, when evaluating a work.