Aleksey Fyodorovich Pakhomov was a painter, graphic artist, teacher, People’s Artist of the USSR, and winner of the USSR State Prize and the Stalin Prize of the second degree.

Aleksey Pakhomov was born in 1900 in the village of Varlamovo, Kharovsky district, Vologda Region. At the age of 15, he entered the School of Technical Drawing of Baron Alexander von Stieglitz in Petrograd, currently known as the Saint Petersburg State Academy of Art and Industry named after the financier and banker Alexander von Stieglitz. He also attended the studio of the painter and graphic artist Nikolay Andreyevich Tyrsa, then he studied under the poster painter and book and magazine illustrator Vladimir Vasilyevich Lebedev.

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 under the guidance of the painter Alexander Ivanovich Savinov, draftsman and theater decorator Sergey Vasilyevich Chekhonin and graphic artist and scene designer Vasily Ivanovich Shukhayev.

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.

In 1942, Aleksey Pakhomov started teaching at the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and in 1949 he received the title of professor. At the institute, he led an easel graphics workshop.

Art historians attribute Aleksey Pakhomov’s works to the Leningrad school of landscape painting.

The portrait from the collection of the Pskov Museum depicts Olga Pavlovna Beyul — an actress of theater and cinema and Honored Artist of the RSFSR.

Olga Beyul graduated from the School of Russian Drama at the Academic Drama Theater in Petrograd in 1922, worked at the Bolshoi Theater and the Leningrad Young People’s Theater. In 1945, she became a recitationist at the Leningrad Philharmonic. She worked as a soloist of the philharmonic department at the Lenkontsert from 1957.

In the portrait, Olga Beyul is depicted against a blue-gray background; she is sitting on a stool with her leg tucked under her body. She is wearing a red short-sleeved blouse and a lilac-purple knee-length skirt. She has a high forehead, brown eyes, and a short haircut.