Nikolai Nikolaevich Baskakov was born May 8, 1918 in a village seven kilometers from the Astrakhan city on the Volga River. His father, Nikolai Evlampievich Baskakov was a carpenter, his mother Evdokiya Vasilievna was a household and raising children - nine sons and two daughters.
In 1933–1939 Baskakov studied of the famous Russian art educator Pavel Alekseevich Vlasov in Astrakhan Art School. In 1939 he was drafted into the Red Army. He served in the Far East. There in 1943 year in the first time he participated in the exhibition, his work \"Khabarovsk, the year 1942\" among of thirty-eight works of artists of Khabarovsk has been shown at an exhibition in Moscow.
In 1945 Nikolai Baskakov comes to Leningrad and entered at the Department of Painting of the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after Ilya Repin, where he studied of Leonid Ovsannikov, Boris Fogel, Genrikh Pavlovsky, and Alexander Zaytsev.
In 1951 Nikolai Baskakov graduated from Ilya Repin Institute in Boris Ioganson workshop together with Alexei Eriomin, Mikhail Kaneev, Maya Kopitseva, Anatoli Levitin, Avenir Parkhomenko, Arseny Semionov, Mikhail Trufanov, Boris Ugarov, and other young artists. His graduation work was historical painting \"Lenin and Stalin in Smolny\".
Since 1951 Baskakov was a permanent exhibitor of the Leningrad Art exhibitions, where he showed his work among with works by the leading masters of fine arts of Leningrad. He painted battle and historical paintings, genre scenes, portraits, landscapes, sketchs from the life. Baskakov worked in the technique of oil painting and drawing. In the same year together with artists Grigory Chepets and Mikhail Trufanov he performed his first large order - the painting \"Presenting of the Order of Lenin to the Kirov factory\", for which he was admitted as a member of the Leningrad Union of Soviet Artists.
Over the years, Baskakov turned to the image of Lenin. First of all he wanted to create image of the man who took upon himself the enormous responsibility for the fate of the country in dramatic moments in her history. In 1956 Baskakov created the painting \"Lenin in the Gorki\", where Lenin was depicted sitting in a chair on a summer day in the garden. The same author\'s approach is seen in large genre painting \"Lenin in the Kremlin\" (1960). Later Baskakov created the paintings\"Lenin on vacation\" (1970) and\"On New Year\'s celebration in Gorky\" (1972).
For the art of Nikolai Baskakov typical appeal to the themes of large public sound and to the image of a contemporary, disclosed in a picture-portrait. He was most known for his impressive portraits of contemporaries painted in realistic style.
The West discovered the art of Nicholas Baskakov in 1989, when his portraits and genre paintings were first shown in Paris at the auctions of the Leningrad school artists. Subsequently many of his works were acquired by American private collections.
In 1991 Saint Petersburg publishing house \"Khudozhnik RSFSR\" issued a monograph by V. Kirillov, devoted to creation of Nikolai Baskakov. Nikolai Baskakov was elected a full member of Peter\'s Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 1989-1992 his paintings were exhibited in France on auctions of Russian paintings L\'Ecole de Leningrad and others.
Nikolai Nikolaevich Baskakov died on October 14, 1993, in Saint Petersburg at the seventy-six year of life. His paintings reside in State Russian Museum, in Art museums and private collections in the Russia, Japan, in the U.S.,Germane, England, France and other countries.