Aleksandr Kuprin, the child of a district school history and geography teacher,[1] was born in the south of Russia in 1880, in Borisoglebsk, a busy inland port on the Vorona River.

By 1910, he had dropped out of school to become one of the founding members of the Knave of Diamonds arts association (Russian: Бубновый валет, Romanized: Bubnovyi Valet).

In 1918, Kuprin took a post as professor at Svomas in St. Petersburg and also at the Vkhutemas design school in Moscow (State Higher Arts and Technical Studios), where he would continue as lecturer until 1952.

He abandoned the approach of the Jack of Diamonds group for a more direct manner, taking up plein air painting and adopting its characteristic treatment of volume and space.

Kuprin was an outstanding master of the industrial landscape (The Plant, 1915; Baku: The Oil Fields of Bibi-Eibat, 1931—both in the Tret’iakov Gallery).