Difficult to classify, Henri Samouilov does not belong to any artistic movement.
He was a self taught painter and sculptor. He began painting at age seventeen. He attended evening classes at the famous « La grande chaumière » artistic workshop in Montparnasse and learned engraving and woodcut at the Ecole Estienne in Paris.
He lived most of his life in a house he had designed so as to have a large studio in which he never stopped painting, drawing and carving.
He found insperation in Surrealism, his world his themes intertwined with the world of dreams, of the invisible, the hidden, the underlying reality. As a matter of f act he did not like « bright light » both litteraly and in its symbolic sens. He chose to create far from any current fashion or commercial expectation.