Franz Alekseevich Roubaud was born in 1856 in Odessa to a middle-class French family. After training at the Odessa Drawing School, in 1877 he travelled to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts to develop his skills as a painter specialising in battle scenes. Roubaud settled in St Petersburg, where he developed the monumentally ambitious, panoramic works for which he later became famous. These extraordinarily detailed, accomplished works were so large that they required specially built pavilions to exhibit them. One example is the Panorama-Bordino Museum in Moscow, still viewable today, which depicts the Russian victory in the Patriotic War of 1812.