Konstantin Korovin (1861–1939) was born on 5 December 1861 (23 November in the old calendar) in Moscow, into a merchant family. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where one of his teachers was Vasily Polenov, and he spent a short time at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg.
Polenov introduced him to the patron Savva Mamontov and his circle at Abramtsevo, which included Viktor Vasnetsov, Ilya Repin and Mark Antokolsky. For Mamontov’s Private Opera Korovin began designing stage sets, and he would work in the theatre for the rest of his life alongside his painting. He is regarded as one of the first Russian Impressionists, a colourist who brought loose, light-filled brushwork into a tradition that had been dominated by the social realism of the Peredvizhniki.
In 1923 Korovin moved to Paris, where he painted views of the city, among them its boulevards in rain and lamplight. He died there on 11 September 1939 and is buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.