In 1865, at the age of nine, Franz Roubaud attended the drawing class at the art school in Odessa, which had been founded there in the same year by wealthy patrons. His promising talent eventually led him to pursue his studies in Munich from 1877, where he was appreciated by the director and great history painter Carl von Piloty at the Academy of Fine Arts. In the private studio of the battle painter Josef von Brandt, he specialized further in the depiction of figures, the composition of multi-figure scenes and their arrangement in the landscape. Tsar Alexander III became aware of him and financed his annual summer sojourns in the Caucasus and the Ukraine, as well as his travels to the then Russian province and the regions around the Black and Caspian Seas in Yerevan, Tbilisi, Baku, Tashkent and Samarkand. He received his first gold medal at the exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg in 1883. His great admirer, Tsar Alexander III, commissioned 19 large paintings depicting the military successes of the Tsarist Empire, for which Roubaud again went on long journeys to Turkey, Persia and Central Asia. He exhibited his works with great success in Paris, Munich and St. Petersburg. He alternated between the latter two cities, and between 1908 and 1913, he taught as a professor of battle and horse painting at the Academy in St. Petersburg. The 1914 exhibition at Munich’s Glaspalast, in which he presented 34 works in one room, marked a high point of his career. During his numerous travels, he produced drawings, photographs and paintings which, in their entirety, are almost of documentary character for the places he visited. The lonely riders in the steppe depict an encounter with people and nature that must have had a somewhat exotic character for visitors to the urban exhibition halls. In particular, the immediacy of the riders approaching the viewer intensifies the impression and allows observers to immerse into the scenery.