Unexpected Visitors

This is the second (and most known) version of Unexpected Visitors. The first one was painted by Repin in 1883; it was significantly smaller in both size of painting and by quantity of personages (the main character was a girl accompanied by a woman and two more girls, supposedly her mother and sisters). Before long, Repin started to paint the second version. He worked in his country house not far from St.Petersburg; the room portrayed in the picture was artist’s living room. As models for the female characters, he used his wife, mother-in-law, and his daughter. In a year, Unexpected Visitors was shown in a traveling art exhibition; however, the artist continued to improve this picture over the next four years. In particularly, he repainted the face of the young man (a political exile who unexpectedly came back home) four times in search of the proper expression. It is generally believed that by depicting the various reactions of young man’s household, Repin tried to show the diverse but mostly positive attitude of society toward the revolutionary movements of the time. Actually, under strict censorship of Czarist Russia, it was a political declaration disguised as an everyday genre scene.