Born in the village of Yegorovo in the Ryazan Oblast Arkhipov (birth name Abram Efimov[ich] Pyrikov) left for the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1877, where he would fall under the tutelage of various Russian artists including Vasily Perov, Vasily Polenov and Vladimir Makovsky.

Antisemitic contemporaries regarded Arkhipov, Ilya Repin and Isaac Levitan as Jewish aliens in Russian culture.

[1] Arkhipov was accepted into the art collective, The Wanderers in 1889, and joined the Union of Russian Artists in 1903.

Themes that occur within his artwork include the lives of Russian women, with some of his realist paintings depicting their grim daily realities.

Like others in the Union of Russian Artists, Arkhipov also painted regularly en plein air, travelling and painting scenes from the North of Russia and the White Sea coast.