Valentin Nikolayevich Leontyev was a painter and teacher that specialized in genre compositions, still lifes, and landscapes. He was born on February 5, 1912. In 1931, he graduated from the Yaroslavl Art and Pedagogical College. Afterward, he continued his studies in Leningrad, where he studied alongside Isaac Brodsky, Boris Ioganson, and Alexander Osmerkin. There, he received a Stalin scholarship. In July 1941, Leontyev volunteered to go to war while in his sixth year at the Institute of the Academy of Arts. He participated in the defense of Leningrad, was taken prisoner near Koenigsberg, and then served on the Belorussian front. Only after the war, in 1947, Valentin Leontyev graduated from the Repin Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, defending his graduation work — the monumental composition “Meeting of the Winners”.

Between 1949 and 1951, Valentin Leontyev, together with his wife, the art historian Tatyana Edelson, taught at the Cheboksary Art School. Valentin Leontyev’s life overlapped with Cheboksary for only three years, which resulted in a large-scale thematic painting and one of his most famous works — “Morning on a Day Off in Cheboksary”.

In 1951, the artist returned to Yaroslavl and began teaching at an art school. In her introductory article to the catalog of the exhibition “Valentin Leontyev and His Students”, the Russian art historian Olga Shikhanova wrote the following,

The works of Valentin Leontyev include such paintings as “Morning in Yaroslavl”, “Industrial Motif”, “Church of Elijah the Prophet”, “Hoarfrost”, “Morning on a Day Off in Cheboksary”, “To the Communism Construction Sites”, “Southern Bazaar”, “Yaroslavl”, and “Winter on the Volga”.

The art critic Olga Shikhanova wrote,