In 1762, he and his brother, Arkhip [ru] were admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts.

In Paris he studied with Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, with whom he copied landscapes by the Old Masters.

[1] In 1773, he and Arkhip went to Rome, where he painted landscapes en plein aire and copied more of the Old Masters, many of which he sent back to the Academy.

By the time he returned to Russia, in 1779, he had travelled through Spain and Switzerland.

His last work on this assignment was a depiction of Potemkin's death in Bessarabia (1791), which was engraved by Gavriil Skorodumov and widely distributed.