Aleksey Fyodorovich Pakhomov was a painter, graphic artist, and book illustrator.
Aleksey Pakhomov was born in 1900 in the village of Varlamovo, Vologda Region. At the age of 15, he entered the School of Technical Drawing of Baron Alexander von Stieglitz in Petrograd.
In 1918, Aleksey Pakhomov worked as a schoolteacher in the city of Kadnikov in the Vologda region.
In 1920, he returned to Petrograd, where he studied at Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops for five years.
In the late 1920s, he began working with book graphics. Illustrations by Aleksey Pakhomov appeared in the book “Schoolmates” by the poet and playwright Samuel Yakovlevich Marshak.
The artist painted “Night Plowing” during a creative trip to a village in the early 1930s.
The painting is part of the artist’s series “The
Sower Commune” which he created after a trip to the eponymous commune in the
North Caucasus, founded in the fall of 1921. The Sal steppes were explored by emigrants
from the Russian Empire who had lived in the United States for 10–15 years. The
community included members of two spiritual ethnoreligious groups, the
Doukhobors and the Molokans. The artist visited the commune during the harvest season
and described it in his memoirs,
