Soutine was born Chaim-Iche Solomonovich Sutin, in Smilavichy (Yiddish: סמילאָוויץ, romanized: Smilovitz) in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus).

He was Jewish[3] and the 10th of 11 children born to parents Zalman (also reported as Solomon and Salomon) Moiseevich Sutin (1858–1932) and Sarah Sutina (née Khlamovna) (died in 1938).

It was the meeting place of writers, painters, sculptors, and actors, often struggling financially, who exchanged and created art and literature whilst sitting and chatting in cafes.

[7] La Ruche — whose rotunda stands on Dantzig Passage in the 15th arrondissement, not far from Montparnasse, a cosmopolitan commune where painters and sculptors from all over, many from Eastern Europe — rented small studios at a low cost.

[11] He haunted the galleries of the Louvre, either hugging the walls or jumping at the slightest approach, and contemplated for hours his favorite painters: "If he loves Fouquet, Raphael, Chardin, and Ingres, it is especially in the works of Goya and Courbet, and more than any other, in those of Rembrandt, that Soutine recognizes himself."

[15] During a visit to Le Midi, Zborowski wrote to a friend regarding Soutine: "He gets up at three in the morning, walks twenty kilometers loaded with canvases and colors to find a site he likes, and goes back to bed forgetting to eat.

"[19] Especially, he imparted extreme deformations to the landscapes, carrying them away in a "rotary movement" already perceived by Waldemar-George in still lifes:[20] under the pressure of internal forces that seem to compress them, the forms spring forth twisting, and the masses rise "as if caught in a maelstrom" as described by Jover.

From 1930 to 1935, the interior designer Madeleine Castaing and her husband welcomed him to their summer home, the mansion of Lèves, becoming his patrons, so that Soutine could hold his first exhibition in Chicago in 1935.

He seldom showed his works, but he did take part in the important exhibition The Origins and Development of International Independent Art held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in 1937 in Paris, where he was at last hailed as a great painter.

[23] On the other hand, he reportedly eagerly accepted the opportunity to create set designs for a ballet by Diaghilev—a project that never materialized due to the sudden death of the impresario in 1929.

Leaving his companion Marie-Berthe Aurenche's home on Littré Street, he sought refuge on Rue des Plants, where she had friends, the painter Marcel Laloë and his wife.

Expelled from several inns where their untidiness or Marie-Berthe's outbursts were criticized, the couple eventually found a house for rent on the way to Chinon, where friends discreetly visited them.

[26] Suffering from a stomach ulcer and bleeding badly, Soutine left a safe hiding place for Paris for emergency surgery, which failed to save his life.

In February 2007, a 1921 portrait of an unidentified man with a red scarf (L'Homme au Foulard Rouge) sold for $17.2 million—a new record—at Sotheby's London auction house.

[34] It is said Soutine rapidly moved from linear and rigid drawing of his still life in order to discover "his true element, the touch of color and its sinuous bending".