The permanent exhibition of the Chelyabinsk State Museum of Fine Arts contains the painting of the Russian landscape artist Lev Kamenev ‘Forest with a Pond’. The artist Konstantin Korovin wrote,

Lev Kamenev was born in 1833 (according to other sources — in 1834) into the family of a small merchant. His father’s business was not going too well, so the young man did not work in the family shop, but in the office of the merchant of the first guild, Mikhail Korovin, instead. In his free time, he painted studies — views of the Moscow environs. He showed his paintings to Korovin surprising him so much that the merchant gave the young artist 5,000 rubles for education. This money allowed Kamenev to get to St. Petersburg, enter the Academy of Arts and study until final examinations. At the exam, the artist was awarded a gold medal and a state-funded trip abroad. Kamenev visited Switzerland and Germany, where in the summer of 1865, he lived with Ivan Shishkin.

In 1854, he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, in the landscape class of Alexey Savrasov. After graduating from this educational institution, Kamenev began to exhibit his paintings at exhibitions of the Society of Art Lovers. With the support of the Society, the artist again traveled abroad and got acquainted with the art galleries of Europe.

However, the artist was not interested in foreign nature. “To paint their Switzerland, ” he said, “you have to be born there, and in my dreams I see our Russian expanse with golden rye, rivers, groves and Russian countryside.”

In 1870, Kamenev became one of the founding members of the the Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions. He continued to paint modest Russian landscapes — quiet river backwaters, wooded hills, domes of churches against the backdrop of meadows.