Pyotr Sokolov, a portrait painter, was from a family of Russian artists; his father was Pyotr Fyodorovich Sokolov (Moscow 1791 - 1848), and Pyotr Petrovich Sokolov studied under him and became a painter and printmaker.

He travelled widely in Russia and painted a number of sharply observed genre scenes depicting the everyday life of peasants and landowners.

He was also a leading book illustrator, and his illustrations for the novel Dead Souls by Nikolay Gogol are especially renowned. These were executed in watercolour in the late 1880s and the 1890s and were produced in two cycles, the first in colour and the second in black and white. His interpretation of the text was intensely dramatic, verging o...