Nikolai Alexandrovich Sergeev

Sergeev was born on 25 March 1855 in Kharkov, then part of the Russian Empire and known today as Kharkiv, Ukraine. He studied landscape painting under Lev Felixovich Lagorio at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. In 1887 he was made an honorary free member of the Academy, and in 1889 he received the Order of St Stanislaus, 3rd Class, in recognition of his artistic activity.

He went on to become a founding member of the St Petersburg Society of Artists, active from 1890 to 1903, and sources also link him to the Society of Russian Watercolorists and to the society named for A. I. Kuindzhi. In 1910 he was elected Academician of landscape painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts. Christie's catalogue notes describe him as having taken part in exhibitions associated with the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, though the specific venues and years of that participation are not documented in the sources available for this profile.

According to Russian-language sources, Sergeev died in 1919, reportedly of typhus in his native Kharkov. The exact date of death is not confirmed in available records, and the reported cause of death rests on a single source, so it is presented here with appropriate caution rather than as settled fact.

Contemporary and modern critical commentary on Sergeev is limited in easily accessible sources, and no verbatim, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile. His standing is better documented through institutional facts than through critical prose: his election as Academician of landscape painting in 1910, his founding membership in the St Petersburg Society of Artists, and the continued presence of his paintings in the State Russian Museum, the Tomsk Museum of Art, and the V. P. Sukachev Museum of Art in Irkutsk. Auction house catalogue notes describe his subject matter as idyllic depictions of the Russian countryside, consistent with the pastoral, rural focus of his known works, such as studies of quiet water and grazing flocks.

Sergeev's best documented auction result is Tending the Flock, which sold at Christie's London in 2007 for USD 373,365, as reported by MutualArt and corroborated by Christie's own lot listing for the same painting. The exact day and month of that sale are not confirmed in available records, only the year 2007 is documented. Other, far smaller sales are recorded for the artist, including a work that brought USD 3,840 at Doyle's Russian Paintings sale in New York, underscoring how thin and uneven public price data remains for him. Collectors should treat the 2007 Christie's result as the best-documented benchmark rather than a certainty, since broader price databases and Russian-language auction archives could not be fully checked for this profile.

Sergeev's name appears in the market under several transliterations, including Sergeev and Sergeyev, and researchers should take care not to confuse him with a different, twentieth-century Russian painter, Nikolai Sergeevich Sergeyev, 1908 to 1989, who shares a similar name but has a distinct biography and market. No catalogue raisonne has been identified for the artist, and there is no confirmed certificate-of-authenticity program tied to an estate or foundation; attribution should rely on Academy and museum records together with the cataloguing standards of the auction house handling a given work. Because public auction data is so sparse, price expectations should be built from direct, verified comparables rather than from a single high-water mark.