Lukian Popov was born in 1873 into a poor plowman family in a village near Orenburg. At the age of twelve, he had to get a job at a stationery shop. However, according to the painter’s recollections, it was then that for the first time he “felt the first unconscious thirst for painting” and began to take drawing lessons from the local self-taught artist Yerofei Mekhed. Popov doubted whether he needed to seriously study painting.

His peasant origin and years of poverty probably explained the attention of Popov the artist towards people and social problems. In the 1900’s, while still studying at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in the class of genre painting master Vladimir Makovsky, he completed the canvas Threesome (Dispute).

Here, Lukian Popov portrayed a lively discussion: a young man in an elegant suit is arguing with a guy in simple casual clothes, most likely a simple-born democrat. 

This being said, Popov cannot be called a politicized artist: over the years, he painted portraits of the nobility on a by-order basis and even painted a portrait of Nicholas II on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. Rather, he took the position of an everyday-life portrayer who depicted contemporary issues in his canvases. Many of his genre paintings are completely devoid of conflict: for example, in the Spiritual Landscape he portrayed nuns against the background of a village church, and in his later work, Deep Sleep, he portrayed peasants sleeping in a field.