Local to the Orenburg region, Popov came from a peasant family. He did a lot of rural landscapes accentuating the plain charm of the village with scenes and details. In the Moonlit Night the moonlight outlines the roofs of the houses; in his A Courtyard at Autumn the artist puts the emphasis on the crossing path, loose with all the water and thawing snow in the courtyard, and in Field Stack he depicts the process of haymaking.

The Imperial Academy of Arts awarded Popov money for foreign study tours three times: he studied the art of the old masters in the museums of Berlin, Dresden, Munich and Paris, and borrowed from their technique. However, he loved Russia so intensely that he asked to replace the third foreign trip with a domestic one, and during his trips along the Volga River and visits to Bashkiria, Mordovia, Chuvash region and the Arkhangelsk and Saratov provinces he familiarized himself with the local nature and way of life.