The painting The Boy on a Donkey was produced in the second year of Fedor Bronnikov’s stay in Italy as a pensioner of the Imperial Academy of Arts.
The painter earned this trip with his successful studies at the Academy. According to the existing at that period practice, after graduation, the best graduates went abroad for several years to improve their painting skills and techniques.
Fedor Bronnikov was born in the small town of Shadrinsk in the Urals (present-day Kurgan region). He got his first drawing lessons from his father, an icon painter. At the age of 16 he went with a passing convoy to the capital.
It took him a little longer than ten years to go from a student in an engraving workshop to a graduate of the Imperial Academy of Arts, the first course that he completed as an external student.