Born in the family of a merchant from Orenburg, Aleksey Chernyshev showed an aptitude for drawing from an early age. He studied under the guidance of an old icon painter and later one of his relatives. In 1841, he was sent to St. Petersburg by the head of the Orenburg region, Vasily Perovsky, who noticed the talented youn man and helped him enroll in the Imperial Academy of Arts as a pensioner of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. At the academy, Chernyshev was a student of Professor Maksim Vorobyov and focused on landscape painting, but later he began to devote more attention to depicting everyday scenes. From 1848, his talent developed rapidly. He received several medals for his paintings and was eventually awarded the title of class artist and a large gold medal in 1851 for his painting "Father Blessing His Daughter on Her Marriage in the Presence of Relatives." Chernyshev's elegant drawings were also highly regarded, and he was appointed a court draftsman with an annual salary of 600 rubles due to his drawings being distributed in large numbers among the albums of the highest nobility and art lovers.