Peasants resting

Alexander Orlowski was a Polish painter and a pioneer lithographer in the Russian Empire (T. Szrajber, ‘Orlowski and the Beginnings of Russian Lithography’, Print Quarterly, IX, no. 4, 1992, pp. 371-379). From 1802 he worked in Saint Petersburg and was appointed a court painter under Czar Alexander I (1777-1825).

Two similar drawings in the same technique and depicting rural subjects, both dated 1802, are in the collection of the Stroganov Palace Museum in Saint Petersburg (inv. no R-1660 and R-1661; Alexander Orlowski 1777-1832, exhib. cat., Saint Petersburg, National Museum, 2002, nos. 15 and 16, ill.).