Petr or Pyotr Petrovich Sokolov, Russian, 1821 to 1899, an oval watercolor painting on paperboard depicting a portrait of a young noblewoman in a white dress. Signed in Cyrillic, lower right. Framed. Pyotr Sokolov is known for Portrait, genre, figure, and landscape painting. Pyotr Sokolov, a portrait painter, was from a family of Russian artists; his father was Pyotr Fyodorovich Sokolov, 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 watercolor in the late 1880s and the 1890s and were produced in two cycles, the first in color and the second in black and white. His interpretation of the text was intensely dramatic, verging on the grotesque, but it was also extraordinarily detailed in its observation of everyday life. One of a kind artwork.