Delegation of voigts before Alexander III

In May 1883, at the coronation festivities in Moscow, Alexander the Third stepped into the courtyard of the Petrovsky Palace to speak to the volost elders, the elected peasant headmen brought in from across the empire. His father had been killed by a bomb only two years earlier, and rumours were spreading through the villages that the land would soon be handed to the peasants. The tsar told them plainly to trust their nobles and to believe no such thing. Repin took the official commission and finished this vast canvas in 1886, nearly five metres wide, crowding the yard with individual faces gathered from every province, the elders nearest the front caught in the clearest light. For years afterwards it hung inside the Kremlin.