[1] He was twenty before he had lessons from a professional artist; Thomas Hesse (1807-c.1870), a Baltic-German painter from Vilnius who had settled in Slutsk to become an art teacher at the gymnasium.
The following year, he was able to begin auditing classes at the Academy, but he had insufficient means to pursue his studies there, failed to find financial support, and was forced to quit.
[1] His only known work on a Chinese theme is a view of a country palace near the city, painted in 1860 and preserved at the Russian Museum.
He returned by way of Irkutsk, where he lived for several years, where he was engaged to paint portraits of the local officials, then settled in Saint Petersburg in 1846 after being dismissed.
In the 1870s, he began to suffer from an eye disease and, through the intercession of Grigory Gagarin and Fyodor Bruni, was awarded a state pension.