Originally trained as a painter of religious icons, Andrei Osipovich Karelin opened a photographic studio and drawing school in the provincial town of Nizhny Novgorod in western Russia. His photographs include portraits, landscapes, and city views, but his most artistically ambitious works were genre scenes, such as this image of a young boy struggling over his studies. Bound together into a collection titled Real Life Photographs, Karelin skillfully blended reality and artifice to create a picturesque vision of provincial bourgeois life.