Landscape painter. Son of retired soldier and guard at the St.Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Ya.Alexeyev. From 1766 to 1773 he was a student at the Academy of Arts. While in Venice on a pension (scholarship) between 1773-1777, he studied theatre and decorative painting, as well as the art of Venetian landscape painters. His teachers were J.Moretti and P.Gaspari. He then made copies of paintings by A.Canaletto. On his return to Petersburg, he was appointed to the Directorate of the Imperial Theatres. From 1779-1786 he worked as a painter at the theatre college. From 1793 Alexeyev was a teacher at the Academy of Arts. In 1794 he was awarded with the title of Academician for his painting View of the Exchange and Admiralty from the Petropavlovsk Fortress (1794). In 1795 he was sent to the Crimea and Malorossia with the aim of "producing views" of the cities. He visited Herson, Nikolayev and Bakhchisaray (1795) and afterwards painted a series of canvases from his impressions. In 1800-1802 he was sent to Moscow, where he painted a series of water colours, the subjects of which he lately employed for his oil paintings. Most of these landscape compositions were reproduced several times. In the 1810s he painted a series of views of Petersburg, which were the pinnacle of his work. F.Alexeyev is the founder of the city landscape genre in Russian art. Developing in his early Petersburg landscapes the traditions of Russian views of the early and middle 18th century, Alexeyev attempts to show the city’s best, ceremonial side. He wanted to emphasise the magnificence of the new capital, using elements of baroque in his landscapes, which help create the dynamic composition, airy perspective, built on subtle colour tints and vast open space. In his views of Moscow the artist, on the contrary, was mainly fascinated by the medieval architecture and everyday life of the city's inhabitants. In the Moscow canvases it is the classical linear composition and distinct and clear-cut figures that prevail. Colour splashes become thicker and brighter. Both principles merged together in his second series of Petersburg landscapes, where the image of the city was realised as the embodiment of absolute harmony in the sublime, ceremonial beauty of classic architecture and poetry in the city’s daily routine.