A portrait painter, who also painted icons. Ivan Petrovich Argunov was a serf of the Counts P.B. and N.P.Sheremetevs who were descendants of Field-Marshal B.P.Sheremetev. Argunov did not receive a systematic art education. In the late 1740s he studied under G.Ch.Grooth, a German artist who worked in Russia, while combining his studies with the duties of bailiff in his master’s houses. His serfdom status played an ambivalent role in Argunov’s artistic career. On the one hand, the dominant will of his master Count P.B.Sheremetev prevented him from fully concentrating on his own creative work and he was made to spend a lot of time on copying and putting together the Count’s art collections. On the other hand, those multifarious activities helped Argunov, to develop his sensitive artistic perception and also his artistic manner. By the mid-1750s his creative individuality had fully evolved. At that time three pupils were sent to his studio by special order of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna. They were three former choristers of the court cappella who "had lost their voices" A.P.Losenko was one of them. Argunov’s studio was becoming one of the centers of art education of mid-18th century Russia. The late 1750s-1760s saw the flourishing of Argunov’s creative potential. He worked then mostly in the genre of portrait painting, but he also supervised the purchasing of paintings for the Count’s collections in addition to undertaking a lot of restoration work. In the 1780s Argunov had a new creative upsurge, with elements of classicism entering his work (see "Portrait of an unknown Woman in Russian Dress", 1784). In 1788 Argunov moved to Moscow as the manager of N.P.Sheremetev’s Moscow house. From the late 1780s onwards he completely gave up his painting career.