In his private life, he had a longtime, younger male companion, Methodiy Lukyanov, and an ambiguous artistic and personal relationship with a young boxer, Boris Snezhkovsky, whom he painted many times.

Later, Filosofov was sent to Italy due to illness, and Somov, who had a hard time studying science, was withdrawn from the school by his father.

[3][6] For three years, from 1897 to 1900, he worked on his early masterpiece Lady in Blue (a portrait of Elizaveta Martynova), painted in the manner of 18th-century portraitists.

Along with landscape and portrait painting, watercolors, gouache, and graphics, Somov worked in the field of small plastic arts, creating exquisite porcelain compositions.

His favorite masters of the past were French rococo artists such as Antoine Watteau, Nicolas de Largillière, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher.

The Russian poet Mikhail Kuzmin noted:Some kind of demon is constantly pushing the artist, as if a piece of a magic mirror from Andersen's fairy tale had hit him in the eye [...].

Anxiety, irony, the puppet theatricality of the world, the comedy of eroticism, the variegation of masquerade freaks, the false light of candles, the sorcery-skull hidden under rags and flowers, automatic love poses, deadness and creepiness of amiable smiles—this is the pathos of a number of Somov's works.

In virtue of all his merits and failings Somov may count [...] upon one of the most prominent places in the history of Russian painting [...] no other artist of the beginning of the twentieth century has mirrored with greater faithfulness the peculiar charm of our super-refined epoch, which knows so much and believes so little.

"[13] From 1907 to 1919, Somov drew over 120 ink drawings, some merely suggestive, some quite explicit, for multiple editions of Le Livre de la Marquise.

A. Sidorov said that Somov "seemingly permitted himself everything from which Russian art had abstained [...] the best of today's graphic artists has genuinely surpassed himself".

He chose instead to settle in Paris in 1925, joining the community of Russian emigre artists, writers, dancers, and musicians that included his old friends Benois, Léon Bakst, and Zinaida Serebryakova.

An idea of the polyglot cultural milieu of Somov's Paris can be gleaned from a letter to his sister dated 19 January 1931:Yesterday I dined at the Leons' with Henrietta and with the famous writer Joyce, who created a stir with his book Ulysses, incomprehensible and rather scandalous.

Firstly, he is a wild alcoholic and his wife, who was present, trembled over him, no matter how drunk he was; secondly, he is almost completely blind, he sees out of the corner of one eye.

[19] In 1918, Somov painted a large portrait of Methodiy Lukyanov sitting on a sofa in pajamas and a dressing gown, which is now in the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.

In great distress, Somov wrote to his sister in Russia:Every minute of my life is now torment—although I do everything I need to—eat, talk with visitors, even work a little—the thought of Methodius and the upcoming separation does not leave me.

Mikhail Seslavinsky in his Randevu (Rendezvous) quotes Somov speaking about Snezhkovsky: "My model, a Russian, 19 years old, turned out to be clever, well-educated and nice."

Golubev's pioneering publication gives the reader unabridged access to the inner workings of Somov's creative process and unabashedly exposes the homoerotic context of his entire oeuvre.

For example [...] Somov's nephew [...] before he transferred the originals to the State Russian Museum in the late 1960s and early 1970s [...] crossed out potentially dangerous political facts and opinions and homosexual content, most of which the editor managed to restore [...].

Somov rendered sexual terms and descriptions in foreign languages, and after 1930 he mostly used a primitive shift cipher to encode such fragments [...].

[23]In 2019, to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg mounted the exhibition Konstantin Somov, which brought together over 100 works by the artist.

[24] Also in 2019, Pavel Golubev curated the exhibition Konstantin Somov, Uncensored at the Odesa Fine Arts Museum in Ukraine.

In 2022, Golubev presented the colloquium "The Lady with the Mask: Homosexuality in the Art of Konstantin Somov" at the University of Pennsylvania.

From the abstract:The same-sex erotic theme featured in many of his paintings and drawings, virtually open homosexual lifestyle, and anti-Bolshevik political views made Somov a disturbing personage for the Russian art historians.

As a result, his artworks and biography were heavily censored in the Soviet time, and the issue of the artist's homosexuality until present day remains painful for his representation in Russia.