Her father was a
Russian military engineer of
French ancestry and she received her secondary education at the , a school for young girls of the nobility. Then, she studied drawing in
Helsinki and took private classes in the workshop of
V. P. Vereshchagin. In 1883, she married the painter
Rufin Sudkovsky, but he died of
typhus only two years later. To help her cope with her grief, she moved to Paris and took more lessons at the private academy of
Jules Bastien-Lepage. In 1889, she married another painter,
Nikolay Samokish, and returned to Russia, where she worked as an illustrator for
Niva, the most popular magazine in the Russian Empire at that time. She was especially known for her color illustrations in the Christmas and Easter additions and the annual calendar. She also created posters, advertisements and theater programs. She became a member of the "First Lady's Artistic Circle" (which existed from 1882 to 1918) and exhibited alongside some of the most prominent painters of that time, including
Ivan Shishkin and
Ilya Repin. Her designs for Tsar
Nicholas II's Coronation Album received an award of excellence, with a medal and blue ribbon. Although she painted numerous portraits and
genre scenes, she is probably best remembered for her book illustrations; notably the ones for
Eugene Onegin by
Pushkin, which were done in 1911, and those for
The Little Humpbacked Horse by
Yershov. Occasionally, she collaborated with her husband, producing illustrations for
Dead Souls by
Gogol (published by
Adolf Marks in 1901) and murals for
Tsarskoye Selo railway station, depicting the history of the
Tsarskoye Selo Railway. She fled to
Vyborg during the
Revolution, then left her husband and lived in Paris during the
Civil War. It is generally believed that she stayed in Paris after the war was over, and died there, although some sources indicate that she returned to Vyborg. == Illustrations from
Eugene Onegin ==