Title of Artwork: “Unexpected Visitors”

Original Title: Не ждали

Artwork by Ilya Repin

Year Created 1884 – 1888

Summary of Unexpected Visitors

This is the second adaptation of “The Unexpected Visitors,” and by far the most popular one. Repin painted the first one in 1883, and both its scale and the number of figures were drastically reduced from later paintings (the main character was a girl accompanied by a woman and two more girls, supposedly her mother and sisters).

All About Unexpected Visitors

Soon after, Repin began work on the second canvas. The interior in the picture was the artist’s living room at his country home outside of St. Petersburg. He used his wife, mother-in-law, and daughter as inspiration for his female protagonists.

Unexpected Visitors was featured in a year-long art show called On the Road. Nonetheless, during the course of the subsequent four years, the artist made further enhancements to this piece.

To that end, he painted over the young man’s face four times until he was satisfied with the look (the man was a political exile who had unexpectedly returned home).

Repin’s depiction of the young man’s family’s varied reactions to the revolutionary upheavals of his day is widely thought to have been an attempt to highlight the moment’s diverse but largely supportive societal attitude.

In reality, it was a political statement couched in the language of a generic everyday scenario in order to avoid the censorship of Czarist Russia.

Information Citations:

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.