He was born on a large farm in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) to Pavel Pokhitonov and Varvara Alekseevna.

His father was a retired military man who had received a title of nobility,[4] was a member of the Kherson governing committee, supervised the local Zemstvo school and was an honorary magistrate.

At that time, many of the students there held revolutionary opinions, and he attended speeches lamenting the plight of small farmers.

They were a success so, after a brief period of employment at the "State Bank of Odessa", he travelled to Italy, then settled in Paris and found a position working with Eugène Carrière.

[5] In 1881, he received an order from the Russian government to paint a series of panels depicting scenes from the Russo-Turkish War.

He travelled to Bulgaria to do sketches for the work, accompanied by Matilda von Wulffert (1856–1927), a Swedish-Finnish medical student he had met at the Russian Artists' Club.

He spent eight months painting in Italy, at a small village outside Naples then, deciding that he could no longer live in Paris, he and Eugenia moved to Liège, Belgium.