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        Pavel Nikolaevich Filonov was born on January 8, 1883 in Moscow, the sixth child of a cabman. His father died in 1887, and his mother became a laundress to support her large family. The children worked too, even Pavel, the youngest, helped his sisters to embroider towels and sell them in the marketplace.
At the age of 6 Pavel began to dance in the corps de ballet in small Moscow theatres to earn a living. In 1896, his mother died. By this time Pavel’s elder sister, Alexandra, was married to a well-to-do engineer. Her husband took all his in-laws to St. Petersburg and gave them all a decent education.
        Pavel, who had shown interest in painting already at the age of 3-4 years old, began to study art and crafts at the School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. As his main trade, he studied house decoration, to become an ornament and stucco molding painter, while also attending evening drawing classes. In 1901, Filonov graduated from the school with the diploma of master-painter and worked at different jobs, from wall coloring to the restoration of plafonds in the Hermitage. In 1903 Filonov tried to enter the Academy of Arts but failed at the entrance examinations. Read Pavel Filonov's Full Biography