Richard Sommer was a painter, graphic artist and watercolourist, one of the founders of the Tiflis Society of Fine Arts.

In 1884 Sommer enrolled as a non-credit student in the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts where he was awarded a number of incentive medals. In 1893 he graduated from the Academy with a degree of the “3^rd class artist”. Sommer worked in Central Asia (1890 till the early 1900s) and the Trans-Caucasus – Georgia (1912-1917), Armenia and Azerbaijan. He produced many paintings and graphic works, primarily ethnographic and genre scenes.

Sommer’s personal exhibition took place in Tashkent in 1915. His everyday and battle scenes and the views of Turkestan’s architecture and old quarters in Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarqand were very popular with his contemporaries. Since 1894 Sommer’s works were displayed at exhibitions of the St. Petersburg Guild of Artists and later at the annual Autumn Exhibitions and expositions of the Guild of the Russian Watercolourists.

Sommer’s works are very clear in composition and precise in details. Realism and impressionism merge in his paintings as in works by many other artists of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. His preference for genre and ethnographic scenes unites him with Vasily Vereshchagin, Jan Ciagliński and Leo Dmitriyev-Kavkazsky.

Richard Sommer’s works are in the collections of the Russian Museum, the Omsk Museum of Fine Arts, the Tula Oblast Art Museum, the Azerbaijan State Museum of Art (Baku), the Samarqand State Museum of the History of Culture and Arts of Uzbekistan and the North Ossetia Republican Art Museum.