Lukian Popov was born into a poor plowman family. However, he managed to graduate from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. Soon after graduation, he became a full-fledged member of the Association of Itinerants, the most populist art association of Russia. Plots from the life of ordinary people have always occupied an important place in his artwork. In his later-period Portrait of the Wife in a Red Sundress (1908), peasant motifs were combined with the image of his wife, Vera Popova.

To his contemporaries, Lukian Popov was known as a subtle portrait psychologist and attentive painter. At the dawn of the twentieth century, his canvases reflected public sentiment before and after the Russian Revolution of 1905. In the early work Threesome (Dispute) of the 1900’s, he portrayed a clash of the various society strata. In the Meadows Flooded, the artist captured popular angst of the post-revolutionary times, and in the painting In Red Light of the 1910’s he showed the confusion of the Russian intelligentsia.

It is interesting to know that, when a teenager, Popov was infatuated with historical and landscape painting. The artist’s first oil painting was the portrait of Peter the Great. In his autobiography, Popov recalled that at the end of the 19th century, at the exhibition of the Itineraries in his native Orenburg, he was “struck” by Fyodor Burov’s painting Peter III Visits Ioann Antonovich in the Shlisselburg Fortress, and that the Landscape with a Swamp by Efim Volkov long dwelled in his memory because of the ‘amazingly depicted damp and fog’.