A political exile, gaunt and shabby, walks unannounced into his family's sitting room. His mother rises from her chair, his wife turns from the piano, the boy looks up in hesitant joy and the little girl does not know him. Ilya Repin reworked the man's face several times after Pavel Tretyakov had bought the canvas, searching for the right mix of doubt and endurance.
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On the wall hang portraits of the poets Shevchenko and Nekrasov, a print of Steuben's Golgotha and a faint image of the assassinated Alexander II on his deathbed.
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