Explore the Subject about the Analysis of this artwork.
The canvas depicts the moment when a man enters a room. He is an exile, most likely a member of the Narodnaya Volya, a Russian revolutionary political organisation founded in the nineteenth century, who has returned from a remote region of Russia. Those in the room, who appear to be his family, were surprised to see him.
Repin expresses the full range of their emotions, in all of their diversity, and in the moment they are created. There is the hesitant joy of the woman seated at the piano, the exiled man's wife, and that of the boy seated at the table, the young girl who looks to the side, probably unaware of who the man is, the wary astonishment of the maid standing in the entrance, the middle-aged woman in the foreground — his mother, whose bent figure expresses profound upheaval.
Russian Narodnaya Volya Russia