Compositeurs slaves

In 1871 a Moscow businessman wanted a picture of the great Slavic composers for his new hotel restaurant, the Slavyansky Bazaar. Established painters laughed at the idea and named huge fees, so the job went to Repin, then in his twenties and badly short of money. The trouble was that the musicians he had to show, Russian, Polish and Czech, some living and some dead for decades, had never been in a room together and never could be. Repin painted the meeting anyway, arranging more than 20 of them into one grand hall as if they were talking between numbers. Glinka, Chopin and the young Rimsky-Korsakov all appear. It was made at the height of Slavophile feeling, when Russian identity and Slavic kinship were fashionable talk, and it put Repin's name on the map.